


Brave as a Noun

by Adolescently



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Child Abuse, Emotional Manipulation, Good Parents Maggie & Wentworth Tozier, M/M, Munchausen by proxy, Pre-Slash, Sickfic, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting, kind of, the losers will appear but this first chapter is basically eddie and richie so
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2020-02-27
Packaged: 2020-11-02 10:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 31,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20721260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adolescently/pseuds/Adolescently
Summary: “I’m not doing this with you. You’ll say I’m crazy and I’m really not in the mood for that right now, Richie.”“What could be crazier than fighting an insane clown in the goddamn sewers? Get real, Eds.”Eddie chews on his lip, his brow creased. Richie focuses very hard on opening his locker so he won’t have to look.“I think” – Eddie stops to haul in a breath, but it’s just a nervous breath, not an asthma attack breath, so Richie relaxes slightly, turns to look at him. “Ithinkmymomispoisoningme.”---After Eddie throws away his placebos, Mrs Kaspbrak resorts to desperate measures to make sure her son takes his medicine.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a while since I hyperfixated on something long enough to write fic for it, but here we are, folks. This is all pretty much based off the movies because tbh reading Stephen King is a Struggle sometimes.
> 
> I'm just weirdly fascinated by Eddie's relationship with his mum, and I know that people with Munchausen by proxy can go so far as to actually induce real symptoms in their victims. My little gremlin brain put those thoughts together and started churning this out. There's nothing explicit yet and I don't know if there will be, but there's gonna be some WILD and abusive parent-child dynamics in this fic, so hang tight if that's something that bothers you.
> 
> Also Bev stays because it's my canon now.

It’s a few weeks into the new school year before anybody really starts to notice.

After all, it was a hell of a summer. All of the losers are pretty messed up from it – Richie can’t count how many times he’s woken up gasping for breath, convinced that that fucking clown is lurking in his bedroom waiting to tear him apart. He keeps a baseball bat beside his bed, these days. The fact that Eddie is a little paler, a little thinner than he was at the start of summer, well. It’s to be expected, really.

That’s what Richie tells himself, keeps telling himself, right up until he comes across Eddie throwing his lunch in the trash before school.

“Eddie, what the fuck?” He finishes locking up his bike and joins Eddie by the trashcan, peers down to see Eddie’s discarded sandwiches in their brown paper bag, the latest in a pile of cigarette butts and banana peels. Eddie, halfway through sniffing an apple, turns to look at him. His eyes widen, then narrow.

“What, dipshit?” He slams the apple into the trashcan with a hollow thunk.

“What, what? Are you on some fucking _diet_?”

Eddie glares at the incredulity in his tone. “Fuck off, Richie.” He slings his backpack over his shoulder and strides towards the school doors.

Richie hurries after him, concern warring with the ever-present desire to bicker with Eddie. “Feeling a little fragile, Eds? Don’t worry, you’re still beautiful to me. I don’t mind a little extra junk in the trunk.” He leers at Eddie, who just gives him a flat look in return. “Y’know, otherwise I’d never have fucked your mom.”

“How about you shut the fuck up, Richie?” There’s a bit more life to him now, but Richie can’t stop thinking about the look on Eddie’s face when Richie caught him. Like a deer in the headlights.

“Come on, man, why throw away a perfectly good lunch? I could’ve had that!”

Eddie wrinkles his nose. “You don’t need two lunches, Richie, unless you wanna get fat and have a heart attack and _die_.” They shove their way into the crowded hallway, assaulted by the crush of people, the chatter of hundreds of students, the slamming of lockers.

They stop next to their own lockers. “Is that why?” Richie asks, focused on opening his locker. “You worried you’re gonna have a heart attack, Eds?”

Normally Eddie would bite his head off for the nickname, but this time he just grabs his books and mutters, “Something like that.” Then he’s gone, disappearing into the throng of students as the bell rings.

Richie sighs and slams his head into his locker. Eddie is so fucking weird sometimes.

* * *

Now that he’s noticed, though, it’s hard to stop thinking about it. He’s not sure when he last saw Eddie eat his lunch, so he puts it to the test that day.

It’s still warm enough that they can eat outside, the seven of them stretched out on the grass behind the school, bickering and complaining about their classes and basking in the late September sunshine. The others are all there already when Richie arrives, so he flops himself down next to Eddie, who’s sitting primly on Stan’s jacket so he doesn’t get grass stains.

“What’s up, losers!” He slings an arm around Eddie, ruffles his hair in a way that’s always guaranteed to piss him off. Sure enough, Eddie shoves him away.

“Get off, asshole.”

“That’s not what your mom said last night,” Richie says, ripping open his backpack. Man, he’s _starving._ You couldn’t pay him to throw his lunch away. He’s halfway through his sub before he remembers the plan, and he tears his packet of chips open.

Ping. A chip bounces off Eddie’s shoulder. Boing. This one hits him in the leg. Doink. A third one bounces off his ear, and Eddie whips his head around from where he was talking to Bev. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Richie aims for Eddie’s mouth this time. “What? I’m not doing anything.” He sees Stan roll his eyes, but it doesn’t deter him from launching another chip at Eddie’s face. “Come on, catch it, dude.”

“Are you kidding me? That is so gross, I don’t want your germy potato chips, okay?”

“Hey, I wash my hands,” says Richie, although truthfully he’s not sure when he last did. Another chip goes flying and hits Eddie’s cheek.

“Quit it, Richie!” Eddie looks about three seconds away from tackling Richie. It’s a look Richie very much enjoys.

“What? I’m just tryna share the love.” He shakes the open bag in Eddie’s direction, an invitation. “Cheese and onion, dude. Your favourite.”

Eddie narrows his eyes like he suspects a trick, but he reaches into the bag and grabs a handful. As he does so, Richie’s eyes drift down to his wrist. He really has lost weight, the delicate bones more prominent than they were just a month ago. The cast is off now, one arm paler than the other.

Still, Eddie wolves down the chips like he doesn’t even care that Richie’s probably-unwashed hands have been in the bag, so clearly eating isn’t an issue. So what the fuck is going on?

He doesn’t push it any further that day, just leaves the open bag of chips between him and Eddie and lets the other boy help himself.

He and Bev go off to smoke – they can’t do it around the other losers anymore because Stan says he’s sick of stinking like cigarettes, and what_ever_ Stanley, it’s better than your natural scent, but anyway.

When they come back, the bag is empty.

* * *

Richie gets to school early the next day, locks his bike up and waits. Behind the tree, but not in like, a creepy way. He’s just curious, that’s all.

It doesn’t take long for Eddie to show up, make a beeline for the trashcan, and toss away his lunch. Again.

“What is the _deal_, Eds?” demands Richie, joining Eddie at the trashcan.

Eddie, midway through putting his backpack on, looks up at him in alarm, a mirror of the day before. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Uh, you? Throwing your lunch away? Ringing any bells, Eddie Spaghetti?”

“Don’t call me that,” snaps Eddie. He starts towards the school and Richie falls into step beside him.

“Fine. Why are you throwing your lunch away, _Edward?_”

Eddie’s face is a storm cloud. “I’m just- testing a theory.”

“Oh, you’re testing a theory, huh, professor? What theory is that?” They step into the hallway just like they do every other day, just like they did yesterday, and Richie hopes today will be different.

Eddie won’t meet his eyes. “How about it’s none of your fucking business?”

Richie hesitates. Normally, it’s easy to tell when he’s crossed a line with Eddie, and he’s careful to toe that line in a way he doesn’t really bother to with anyone else. Today, though, alarm bells are ringing in his head. He needs to push.

“Come on, dude.” He knocks his shoulder into Eddie’s. “What’s going on?”

Eddie huffs out a sigh. “I’m not doing this with you. You’ll say I’m crazy and I’m really not in the mood for that right now, Richie.”

“What could be crazier than fighting an insane clown in the goddamn sewers? Get real, Eds.”

Eddie chews on his lip, his brow creased. Richie focuses very hard on opening his locker so he won’t have to look.

“I think” – Eddie stops to haul in a breath, but it’s just a nervous breath, not an asthma attack breath, so Richie relaxes slightly, turns to look at him. “Ithinkmymomispoisoningme.”

Uh.

This is so far from what Richie is expecting that the air is temporarily knocked from his lungs, and all he can do is gape. A red flush creeps its way up Eddie’s neck.

“See! I told you, you think I’m fucking crazy.” Eddie slams his locker and makes to storm away, but Richie grabs his arm.

“Wait!” He drags Eddie round the corner and into the janitor’s closet. They’re assaulted by the sharp scent of cleaning supplies and Richie knocks a mop over as he tugs Eddie inside. The door shuts behind them, muffling the chattering and laughter coming from the hallway. Richie reaches over and pulls the cord for the light, showering them in a fluorescent glow.

Eddie is staring at him like he’s lost his mind. “Richie, you know we’ve got English in like, two minutes” –

“Eds.”

The air rushes out of Eddie like a balloon deflating. “Look, I don’t – I’m not sure, yet, okay? But. Okay, you remember what I told you? About my pills?”

A fond smile tugs at Richie’s lips despite himself. Watching Eddie send his fanny pack flying had been one of the greatest things he’d ever seen, almost great enough to quell his anger at Mrs K and the fucked up lies she’d been telling Eddie his _entire life. _“Yeah,” he says, instead of saying that. “The gazebos.”

“Well, I told my mom I wasn’t taking them anymore, _obviously_, since they’re bullshit, and she just freaked out. Like, totally lost it. But then she was fine a couple of days later, just weirdly calm, you know?”

Richie doesn’t know. He’s never seen Mrs K be calm in his life, but he bites down hard on this response, not wanting Eddie to stop talking.

“So I thought, okay, guess she’s over it, she knows I know, we can all move on, right?”

“Right,” says Richie. Out in the hallway, the bell rings. First period. They ignore it. Eddie’s a little twitchy in that hyperactive way he always is, but he doesn’t seem to want to stop now that he’s started, the words spilling out of him like vomit the way they always do when he’s worried about something.

“Then I had that stomach flu a couple weeks ago,” Eddie says, and Richie remembers now. Eddie had been on lockdown all weekend, missed out on a trip to the quarry. The remaining six of them had spent hours splashing around in the water while Richie tried to pretend he didn’t feel like he was missing a limb. “My mom seemed kinda… happy about it? Like, she’s always fucking unbearable when I’m sick, but this was next level. She kept bringing me soup and shit, and it tasted kind of weird but she just said it was this new recipe she was trying out so I thought, okay, what the fuck ever, it’s just soup, but it didn’t – it wasn’t helping. I just felt worse every time she brought me it.”

Richie feels a pit opening up in his stomach. This is probably the longest they’ve ever gone talking about Mrs K without him making a joke about banging her, but he knows if he makes any kind of joke right now Eddie will never speak to him ever again. This is some serious shit.

“Anyway, I stopped eating it ‘cus I was just feeling shitty, and then I got better. I didn’t really think about it after that, but lately… well, every time I eat my mom’s food I just feel like shit. Like, I wanna throw up or I feel like I’ve got fucking pneumonia or my whole fucking body aches. I don’t know, maybe she’s just a shitty cook but I’ve always been fine before it’s just since I stopped taking the pills and I think she wants to try and make me take them again I think she wants me to be sick” –

“Eddie,” Richie interrupts, places his hands on Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie’s wheezing now, shoulders heaving as he takes in great gulps of air, and when he meets Richie’s eyes his eyes are wide like he can’t believe what he’s saying. “Breathe.”

But Eddie can’t seem to calm down, his hands slapping at his jacket pockets. He’s looking for his inhaler, a movement Richie recognises from the million other times he’s seen it, but Eddie doesn’t carry his inhaler anymore. Not since he found out about his meds.

The thing is, the rest of the pills might have been gazebos but Richie’s pretty sure Eddie actually does have asthma, and even if he doesn’t he’s been using that inhaler for basically his entire life. Going cold turkey on that shit probably isn’t a great idea.

Okay, so. _Maybe _Richie worries about this kind of stuff, and _maybe _he carries around a spare inhaler with him just in case. Shut up.

He swings his backpack off his shoulders, knocking a bottle of bleach off the shelf behind him, and unzips it. Eddie’s wheezing is loud and harsh in the confined space and Richie fumbles around in his bag, finally finds the inhaler and puts a hand on Eddie’s neck to steady him. His skin is warm under Richie’s hand and he puts the inhaler between Eddie’s teeth, the other boy reaching for it with shaky hands, and presses the trigger once, twice.

Eddie breathes. Richie breathes with him. Eddie’s had probably a million asthma attacks in his life and Richie has been witness to most of them, but it never stops being scary the way Eddie’s lungs just lock up.

They’re silent for a few moments, until Eddie says, “You still carry that fucking thing?”

Richie pockets it. “Good thing one of us does, shitbird.”

Eddie doesn’t rise to the bait for once, just laughs shakily. “Yeah.”

“So that’s why you’re not eating? You think your mom’s trying to make you sick?”

Eddie wraps his arms around himself. He looks small in a way that he never does, for all that he’s the shortest of the losers. “I’m not _not eating_. I’m just not eating anything she gives me. Then I’ll know for sure.”

“What about at dinner?” Richie says, because simple questions are easier than confronting the overwhelming horror of this situation. If he’s not eating what his mom gives him, what the fuck is he eating? Eddie doesn’t have a lot of money. “Don’t you guys eat together?”

Eddie shrugs. “I mean, the TV is on most of the time, so she doesn’t, like, watch me or anything. I just spit it out into a napkin.”

Eddie. Spitting his dinner into a napkin. This, more than anything he’s said so far, drives it home for Richie, because even he thinks that’s fucking gross. Eddie wouldn’t do something like that unless he really, honestly thought his mom was trying to poison him.

“Do you think I’m crazy?”

Richie swallows, his mouth dry. On the surface of it, _my mom is trying to poison me _is an absolutely batshit thing to say. Truthfully, though, Mrs K really does seem to like it better when Eddie’s sick – and Eddie finding out he isn’t, that he hasn’t ever been as sick as Mrs K told him he was, well. Maybe something like that could make her go off the deep end.

It’s just wrong, though. She’s his _mom_. Okay, so Richie’s mom can be kind of distant and she likes her wine, but she’s there with a hug when he really needs one. And maybe his dad is busy with his dentistry and the house is silent most of the time, but he never fails to give Richie one of his weary smiles when Richie makes some smartass comment and most importantly of all neither of them have ever fucking poisoned him.

Parents are supposed to take care of you. What do you do if they don’t?

Eddie looks like he might throw up and Richie realises he’s taken way too long to respond. “No,” he blurts. “I don’t think you’re crazy. I mean, I hope you’re wrong, but- it’s not like I don’t get it. It kind of makes sense.”

This does not seem to ease Eddie’s mind. His breathing is speeding up again. Was that the wrong thing to say? Fuck, Richie and his stupid trashmouth. He always has something smart to say except when it really matters.

“I kind of hoped I was,” Eddie says. He’s shaking again and Richie can’t help himself, he yanks on Eddie’s arm and pulls him into a hug. Eddie’s heart is pounding so hard that Richie can feel it where their chests are pressed together. He tightens his arms, trying to hold Eddie together.

Finally, Eddie stops trembling enough for them to step apart. Richie feels weird, flushed and kind of embarrassed which is crazy because Eddie’s his friend and they’ve hugged each other almost as much as they’ve insulted each other.

“Come on,” he says, finally. “We’re ditching first period already, might as well go the whole nine and skip the rest of the day.”

Eddie shifts, his eyes darting up to meet Richie’s and then back to the ground. “If my mom finds out I skipped school…”

“Eds, she’s fucking _poisoning _you, she doesn’t get to be mad about you ditching class.” Richie wraps an arm around Eddie’s shoulders, tugs him out of the janitor’s closet. The halls are quiet. “You wanna come over to mine for dinner?”

“Uh, not if your mom’s making her fucking mac and cheese again,” Eddie says, which is a blatant lie because everyone loves his mom’s mac and cheese. Richie doesn’t call him on it, too relieved that Eddie seems to be coming back to himself.

“I don’t think so,” he says instead. They slip out of one of the side entrances, a fire exit for which the alarm broke several years ago. The sun is warm on their faces and Richie breathes in a lungful of fresh air, grateful to be out in the open again, to not feel like he’s about to burst out of his skin.

Eddie shrugs. “Okay, then. Thanks.”

Richie grins at him. “You wanna go to the quarry? Y’know, since you missed out the other weekend, what with your mom poisoning you and all.”

“Really?” Eddie narrows his eyes at him. “We’re gonna do this?”

He’s not really annoyed, though. Richie can always tell the difference. They ride double on Richie’s bike, bickering the whole way, and Richie tries hard not to think about what they’re going to do after this. Eddie can’t eat at Richie’s house for the rest of his life. Well, Richie would let him, obviously, but his parents might start asking questions.

For today, for now, he just keeps pedalling, Eddie’s hands tight on his shoulders, like he can cycle fast enough to leave all of their problems in the dust.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't intend to update so soon, but I wrote this today and I love instant validation so here's chapter two. Don't get used to the speedy updates, folks.
> 
> Thank you all so much for your comments and kudos, I didn't expect such a lovely response :)

“Do you think…”

Eddie trails off, staring out at the water. His hair is still damp from their earlier swim, little droplets falling onto his bare shoulders. Richie tears his gaze away and makes himself look out at the quarry. They’re sitting at the water’s edge, surrounded by the looming rock walls on all sides, drying in the warmth of the early afternoon sun. They could be the only two people in the world.

“Do I _think?_ Uh, yeah, usually.”

Eddie turns to look at him, unamused. “Could’ve fooled me.”

Richie flops backwards so that he’s lying down, staring up at the sky. A perfect cornflower blue, the last remnants of a summer that he can already feel slipping away from them. “Do I think what, Eds?”

“Do you think you can stop calling me _Eds_, shitheel?”

“No can do, Eds. What’s up?”

Eddie sighs. There’s a soft whoomp as he falls backwards to lie next to Richie, sparse inches between them.

“It’s stupid.”

“Yeah, so’s every other word that comes out your mouth, but that’s never stopped you before.” Richie kind of regrets the words as soon as he says them. He’s too fucking harsh, too abrasive. Eddie’s basically told him his mom is trying to make him sick and this is how he treats the kid? Sometimes his nickname really does suit him.

He turns his head to look at Eddie. There’s a tightness to his expression that Richie recognises from the million other times that Eddie’s worked himself up into a snit about something or other. Usually it’s over Richie spending too long in the hammock or making one too many jokes about his mom’s vagina, but today. Well. Today is different. Heavier.

“C’mon, Eddie, you can tell me anything.”

There’s silence, just the breeze echoing in the quarry, the birds flying overhead. Eddie won’t look at him when he asks, “Do you think my mom loves me?”

Apparently today is the day to be blindsided by Eddie fucking Kaspbrak.

“What the fuck?”

Eddie shoots upright at this response and Richie immediately sits up as well, and shit, are those _tears?_

How did he fuck this up so badly? He should have sent Bill to check on Eddie this morning. That guy is ten times more sensitive than him. Sometimes Richie thinks he should fake a stutter just to give himself more time to think before he says stupid shit.

Eddie blinks furiously against the tears welling in his eyes, his lips pressed together so they’re one thin white line. “Never mind. Forget I fucking asked.” He’s coiled tight like a spring and Richie doesn’t dare touch him.

“She’s your mom, Eddie. She loves you,” he says, which is what he should have said first.

“Does she?” Eddie’s voice is shaky. “When you love someone you don’t want them to be sick.” He swipes at his face. No tears have fallen yet but his cheeks are flushed and his breathing is shallow. Richie feels like he might puke.

He doesn’t know what to say, which is kind of a first for him. The truth is – and he feels stupid, stupid and young to even think this – it’s never crossed his mind what it would be like if his parents didn’t love him. Of course they love him. He’s their son. They don’t always get along and he’s sure they don’t love everything about him, but. Well. Parents love their kids. This is a fundamental truth of the world.

“I think,” he says, “she loves you too much.”

Eddie gives him a look of deep condescension, so he hurries on. “I mean, she’s always been overbearing as fuck, we know that. I guess she just- loves you so much she doesn’t want anyone else to have you. Even if that means, well.” _Poisoning you._ The words hang in the air.

“That’s probably the most insightful fucking thing you’ve ever said,” says Eddie. His breathing is still shaky. “Insightful and not even a little bit comforting. That’s not love! It can’t be, right? I mean, that’s just fucking possessive, and what if she- what if she put too much in and it fucking killed me, I mean no one who loved me would take that kind of risk, would they?” He’s tripping over his words again, they’re spilling out of his mouth so fast. Normally Richie finds that endearing (shut up) but right now he can’t think of anything past the rush of blood in his ears.

What if she killed him?

It’s no secret in the Losers Club that Richie and Eddie are best friends. They’re all best friends, of course, but Eddie and Richie are _best friends. _They’re their own thing, separate from the big group friendship they all share, and Richie likes it that way. He likes that Eddie comes to him first when there’s something he wants to share, he likes that he’s the only one Eddie will share the hammock with (even if it’s only because Richie never gets out when its his turn), he likes how sharp tongued Eddie is, the way they bite at each other constantly but never really fight.

He’s never, ever thought about what it would be like if Eddie died.

Not even after that first awful fight in the house on Neibolt, when he had to snap Eddie’s arm back into place (and sometimes he can still feel the grind of bone under his hands, the awful popping sensation beneath Eddie’s skin as Richie snapped), when they all kind of nearly died. He didn’t think about it, because it wasn’t going to happen.

Even when they were kids, before It, before Georgie died, he never thought about it. They knew Eddie was sick, of course, that was common knowledge. He was so fucking careful about it, popping pills five times a day whenever his wristwatch started beeping at him. In class, at lunch, at the quarry, he’d even pull his bike over mid-cycle so he could take them straight away.

Richie had asked him, once, and Eddie had never been very clear on what exactly he _had, _but Richie had been certain he wouldn’t die of it. Kids didn’t die.

Now, of course, he knows that they do. Kids die. But Eddie doesn’t.

He doesn’t know how to tell Eddie that it sounds like his mom really doesn’t love him. That’s not something you tell someone, especially not Eddie.

“Maybe it’s something else,” he says instead. “I mean, maybe it’s just a coincidence, you feeling sick after you eat your mom’s shitty cooking. Maybe you’re just- actually sick, for once. Or maybe it’s allergies.”

Eddie frowns. “I thought about that,” he admits. “But the timing is just… weird, y’know?”

Richie nods, because Eddie’s right. “Well then, I do believe we need to do an experiment, professor!”

“Again with the voices,” Eddie mutters, but the tears are gone from his eyes now. “What experiment?”

“Tomorrow,” Richie says, “you don’t throw your lunch out. You give it to me.”

Eddie’s jaw drops. “No. Fuck no.”

“Come on, Eddie! I feel fine. I never get sick, so if I eat your lunch and get the fucking plague then we’ll know for sure.”

“I’m not gonna poison you, Richie!”

“Technically it’d be your mom poisoning me,” Richie says. Honestly, he’s not that happy about this either, but he’s always folded like a cheap deckchair in the face of Eddie’s tears. “Come on dude, don’t you wanna know?”

Eddie swallows. “Yeah,” he says. “I do. But not like this.”

Richie shrugs. “I mean, you’ve eaten way more than one meal’s worth of your mom’s food and you’re still kicking, so one lunch isn’t gonna kill me. Not unless that lunch is your mom’s vagina.” He can’t resist the dig, the tension in the air too thick.

“Y’know what, I take it back,” says Eddie. “I hope it does kill you.” He’s sniggering, though, and Richie takes it as a win.

“All right, enough of this shit,” he says. “We’re ditching school, let’s make it worth our time!” He’s on his feet and running, leaping into the water before Eddie can say another word.

* * *

He and Eddie make it back to his house before his parents. Nobody’s been home all day and Richie is quick to delete the message the school left on the answering machine informing them that he hadn’t been at school today. Eddie watches him with a pale face. Mrs K was home all day.

Still, that’s a problem for later. That night they fuck about reading comics and making fun of each other’s music taste and arguing over how long it’ll take Ben to make a move on Bev – there’s been nothing ever since the kiss in It’s lair. Eddie is insistent that it’s gonna happen soon. Richie thinks he’s got too much faith. They’re gonna be waiting a long ass time for that shit to resolve itself.

They eat dinner – mac and cheese, ha – with his parents, who are always happy to see Eddie. They think he’s a good influence on Richie because he’s so careful and Richie is so reckless. What would they think if they knew how the two of them had beaten the shit out of a murderous clown that summer?

When Eddie leaves that night he’s pale, chewing at his knuckle in a distinctly un-Eddie-like manner. Richie almost calls him back, tells him to stay for the night, for life if it’ll keep him away from his crazy mom, but he can’t. That’s not part of the plan. Richie stands on the doorstep and watches Eddie walk away, clenching his fists at his side.

The next day he wakes up with an awful twisting sensation in his stomach, which isn’t gonna help them figure out whether Eddie’s lunch is making him sick. But when he arrives at school and finds Eddie by the bike racks, laughing at something with Bill and Stan, the knot in his stomach eases.

Oh.

Eddie smiles at him as he approaches. “Did the school call your mom?” Richie asks.

“Yeah, and she was _pissed_,” says Eddie. “I’m grounded for the next, like, fifty years. She had a goddamn aneurysm; I swear she was this close to calling the cops to report me missing.”

Richie groans, weekends worth of fun disappearing before his very eyes. “Just climb out your window, she’ll never know you’re gone.”

Stan raises his eyebrows at this. “Eddie? Climb out his window?”

“R-right, and break his other arm,” Bill says, smirking. “You know, I can’t b-b-believe you guys ditched.”

Richie rolls his eyes. “You’re just pissed we didn’t take you with us,” he says, falling into step beside Eddie as they make their way up to the school. “Poor Bill had to sit through another fucking sewing lesson in Home Ec while _we_ hung out at the quarry.”

“Right, and now Eddie has to spend the rest of his life inside watching _All My Children _with his mom,” says Stan. Richie and Bill snigger, and Eddie glares.

“I don’t watch that shit, okay?”

This argument carries them through to homeroom, and Richie sits through his morning classes restlessly, jiggling his leg and clicking his pen and driving everyone crazy. At lunch he meets the others at the usual spot, soaking up the last of the warmth before autumn hits. Through the chorus of greetings, Eddie stares at him with worried eyes, gnawing on his lip. Richie has the urge to place his hand on Eddie’s cheek, to ease away the anxious wrinkle to his brow with his thumb. He swallows it down and unzips his bag.

“Alright, Eddie Spaghetti. Switch.” He holds out his lunch, his nice, safe, unpoisoned lunch.

“Don’t call me that,” says Eddie, the irritation wiping the anxiety from his face. He reaches into his backpack and produces his brown paper bag.

“Why are you guys switching lunches?” asks Bev. She’s lying on the grass, peering at them from behind her sunglasses, eyebrows raised.

Eddie shoots him a quick, pleading look, but it’s unnecessary. Until they figure this out, it stays between them. “My mom’s given me bologna for three straight weeks,” says Richie, handing his sandwich to Eddie and accepting the bag in return. “If I eat any more of that shit I will lose my mind.”

Bev grins, and that’s the end of that. Richie opens the bag, paper crinkling, and looks inside.

The sandwiches look pretty innocuous, chunks of chicken and cherry tomatoes and crisp lettuce surrounded by thick slices of brown bread (“_white bread is basically pure sugar, Richie, and if you get diabetes they chop your foot off and you could _die.”) Richie lifts one out of the bag and inspects it as subtly as he can, resisting the urge to sniff it.

It doesn’t _look_ poisonous, but his stomach lurches anyway. He imagines biting into it and thick black sludge, the same black sludge that It puked all over Eddie in those fucking sewers, spewing out and choking him.

His mouth is dry, his tongue heavy in his mouth, and he feels the weight of Eddie’s gaze on him. He doesn’t look over, doesn’t want Eddie to convince him not to do this. They need to know.

He takes a bite.

The tomatoes are sweet and juicy and the chicken is nicely seasoned and the lettuce is at its peak of freshness, where it crunches just right. Richie chews slowly, methodically. It doesn’t taste like poison, but what does poison even taste like?

He swallows. “Awesome. Thanks, Eds.”

Eddie hasn’t started eating yet, staring at Richie the whole time, but Richie’s words seem to jolt him back to reality and he just nods and looks away, shoulders hunched.

He eats both sandwiches and the apple – surely that’s safe, right, how do you poison a fucking apple? – without feeling anything strange. How long does poison take to kick in? Should he be feeling something by now? By the end of lunch he’s still fine, and he heads to History with Ben and Stan feeling the weight of the world roll off his shoulders. Eddie’s lunch is fine. It’s all fine.

Two hours later, he feels like he’s been hit by an eighteen-wheeler. Every muscle aches and his head is pounding and just walking feels like trying to wade through syrup with a ball and chain around his ankle.

Jesus, how has Eddie been walking around like this? None of them even noticed he was sick. That kid is made of pure steel.

He and Eddie meet by the bike rack, as agreed. Richie makes it there first and slumps against the rack, grateful for the support. His mind is racing. How is he gonna break this to Eddie? What are they going to _do?_ He hadn’t disbelieved Eddie, really, but he hadn’t wrapped his head around the concept either. Eddie’s _mom_ is doing this to him.

Thankfully, he doesn’t have to say anything at all. Eddie arrives, takes one look at him, and breathes out, “Shit.” His eyes are huge and suspiciously shiny.

Richie nods, regretting it when the pounding in his head intensifies. “The results are in, doc. It’s not good.”

Eddie frowns. “Why would you be giving results _to _the doct- never mind. You need me to bike you home?”

That’s just- so Eddie. The guy has just confirmed that his mom is poisoning him and he’s worried about _Richie. _Richie swallows. “Man, you’ve been walking around like this for weeks now. If you can handle it, I can too.”

The frown deepens. “I’m not… it’s not that bad. I’m fine. Just don’t be a macho jerk, okay? I don’t want you to crash your bike, let me drive it.”

His muscles are pretty sore, and his house feels a long way away from here right now. Richie sighs. “Fine. You’re so bossy.”

They make it back to Richie’s house in record time. Eddie pedals like a lunatic, legs pumping, his breathing so harsh that Richie thinks he might give himself another asthma attack, but he doesn’t.

“You coming in?” asks Richie, leaning against one of the posts supporting the porch covering.

Eddie hesitates. “You need to rest,” he says, “you obviously feel like shit.”

This is true. All Richie really wants to do is collapse on his bed and take about a zillion aspirin tablets to calm the pain coursing through his body, but he also really, really doesn’t want Eddie to go home right now.

“You can be my nurse,” he hears himself saying, and Eddie wrinkles his nose at this. “My doctor, then, fine. Whatever. Just come in, okay?”

Eddie slumps. “Okay.” And he follows Richie into the house, fusses over him and makes him get into bed and wait while he brings him water and aspirin and puts his hand on Richie’s forehead to check for a fever. His hand is cool against Richie’s skin and he feels the loss when Eddie moves away.

“I don’t think you have a fever,” Eddie says, perched at the end of the bed, and then he bursts into tears.

Richie rockets upright, almost knocking over his glass of water. Eddie’s shoulders are shaking and he buries his face in his hands, muffling the sobs that choke their way out of him. Richie scrambles out from under the covers to sit beside him, puts an arm around his shoulders. Careful, like Eddie’s made of glass.

“Hey hey hey, Eddie! Eddie, it’s okay,” he says, frantic because they both know full well that it isn’t okay. It’s not even in the same universe as okay. “It’s okay.”

Eddie cries harder, chest heaving with real harsh sobs like he just can’t hold them in. “It’s not okay, Richie!” He uncovers his face and swipes furiously at his cheeks, red and tear stained. “It’s not fucking okay! My mom – she – and you – and I shouldn’t have let you eat it and” – he peters off into incoherency, fresh tears spilling from his eyes, and Richie aches in a way that has nothing to do with the sandwiches.

“Eddie, I’m fine,” he says, because he can at least tackle that part of it. “I’ve had way worse than this, dude, I’ll be back to my awesome self by tomorrow.” Truthfully, though, he can’t remember the last time he felt this bad. He hopes whatever shit Mrs K has been putting in Eddie’s food isn’t permanent. Shit, he really hopes it isn’t.

Eddie looks at him in disbelief. “You look like you got hit by a bus, Richie!”

“No way. A moped at best,” says Richie. “I’ll be _fine_, Eds. I’m more worried about you.”

Eddie swallows wetly. “What am I gonna do?” His voice is soft, a little hoarse from all the sobbing.

Richie doesn’t know how to answer that one, so he pulls Eddie in for a hug. He can feel a damp patch forming on his shirt, Eddie’s tears soaking into the fabric, and he braces himself against a tidal wave of emotions, clamps down hard. _Not right now._ “I don’t know, Eds,” he says. “But we’ll figure it out, I swear. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Eddie just clings to him and shakes, and they stay that way for a long time.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot when I was writing this that Mike is actually homeschooled so uhhhh he's not any more! My canon now.
> 
> Not a lot actually happens in this chapter, but we get to see all the losers together and we get a glimpse into Eddie's POV so I hope you guys like it anyway! Thank you for all your kudos and lovely comments and to everyone who's subscribed to this, it makes me smile to know other people are enjoying this and I hope you all continue to <3
> 
> I have written zero (0) words for the next chapter so uh it'll be here when it's here. Hopefully soon!

Eventually, though, Eddie does have to go home. He’s already grounded for pretty much his entire _life – _getting home any later than he’s already going to is like asking his mom to kill him.

Jokes like that aren’t really so funny anymore.

“You could stay here, if you want,” Richie says, as Eddie heads for the door. Eddie hesitates with his hand over the doorknob.

“I want to,” he says. “But if I don’t go home it’s gonna be ten times worse.”

Richie knows this. He wants him to stay anyway.

“I think we should tell the others,” he says instead of this. “About all this.”

Eddie swallows. “I guess.” He still hasn’t turned around, so Richie can only see the tightness of his shoulders, can’t read his expression.

“What?”

Eddie sighs and turns, leaning against the door. “I don’t want them knowing,” he says. “It’s- it’s embarrassing.”

Richie groans. Eddie can be such a _dumbass _sometimes. “It’s not your fault your mom’s batshit,” he says. “No one’s gonna judge you. You know they’ll wanna help.”

Eddie swipes at his face. His eyes are raw and red from crying but the flood has finally, mercifully slowed. He still looks like pretty much the most tragic thing Richie has ever seen, though, and his chest _aches._ How can he let him walk out of here, back to that house where his mom-

“Fine.” Eddie gulps again and shifts his weight from foot to foot. “We can tell them.” He swings open the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And he’s gone before Richie can say another word – not that he has any left.

The door clicks shut behind him and Richie falls backwards and stares at the ceiling.

_Fuck._

* * *

Eddie slips into the house, softly softly softly shuts the door behind him, holds his breath and prays that his mom isn’t home yet. The TV is blaring in the living room but that doesn’t mean anything – his mom leaves it on day and night even though Eddie is sure they’d save a fortune if she’d just turn it off once in a while, but Ma is adamant that the TV being on will deter burglars, and does he _want _to be attacked by home invaders, Eddie-bear?

He takes his shoes off and pads past the open door, whisper soft, risks a quick glance inside. His mother’s armchair is empty.

Heart pounding, Eddie darts up the stairs. If his mom isn’t home yet, she never has to know he went over to Richie’s first. As far as she knows, he’s been home ever since school let out, studying by himself. He throws himself into his desk chair and spreads his homework out, haphazard like he’s been working on it for a while.

Of course, his Geography assignment is the furthest thing from his mind right now. He’ll probably get a D on it unless he can focus his brain past the constant gut-wrenching stream of _my mom is trying to hurt me my mom is trying to hurt me my mom is trying to hurt me._

He sits at his desk in silence, hands gripping at his knees so tightly that his neatly-trimmed nails dig in and leave perfect little crescent dents in the skin. It takes real physical effort to breathe, as though he’s acutely aware of each individual process involved. Inhale. Air down the airway. Lungs expand. Exhale. Air up the airway. Lungs deflate. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Some time passes before he manages to stand up. When he does, he checks his watch and finds that it’s only half past five after all. His mom probably won’t be home until after six – it’s Wednesday, and on Wednesdays she stays late at work. Pulling overtime so she can afford Eddie’s medication, _it all adds up, Eddie-bear._

Nausea claws at his throat. He forces it down and, filled with a sudden frantic fear, races downstairs. He feels hot and the blood is rushing in his ears, drowning out the cacophony coming from the TV as flies past the living room door.

He’s ransacked half of the kitchen cupboards before it occurs to him that his mom probably wouldn’t keep poison just lying around where he could find it.

His hands shake as he puts the cupboards back the way he found them, stacking his mother’s snacks just-so, rearranging the hundred and one pills that Eddie refuses to take these days but his mother keeps anyway. When he glances at his watch again, he has ten minutes until his mother gets home.

“Shit!” So stupid, to waste all that time looking in a place that there’s no way it’d be. Eddie bites back a scream and ventures back upstairs, to a room he hasn’t entered in years, not since he was a tiny kid.

It’s dark in his mother’s room, and when he flicks the light switch a dull yellow glow illuminates the rumpled dusky pink bedsheets, the discarded packets of Oreos and donuts and Doritos, the cluttered bedside table. For the first time, Eddie wonders how someone so untidy can be so concerned with health and hygiene. His skin is crawling just standing in the doorway.

He picks his way across the carpet, careful not to disturb anything in case the whole place comes tumbling down like a giant game of Jenga. Standing in the centre of the room, a pristine island in the ocean of his mother’s mess, he clenches his fists, suddenly so angry he could die of it.

His mother makes these rules, plants the seeds of these awful thoughts in his head and nurtures them into vines that grow and grow and choke him down into something small and soft and scared, and she doesn’t even – they’re not even _real. _She doesn’t even follow them herself. Eddie has _watched _his mother balloon over the last decade, seen her stuff herself with junk food and lecture Eddie about diabetes. He’s seen the way she doesn’t even shower every goddamn day despite the fact she has Eddie scrubbing his hands raw trying to keep the germs at bay. It’s all on him. How the fuck did he never see it before?

Eddie feels the tears pricking at his eyes again and fights them back, blowing a harsh breath out of his nose. He’s cried enough for one day. He’s known for weeks now the depths of his mother’s deception. This is just another drop in the bucket. He needs to focus. He needs to find the poison.

First he tries the bedside table, rattles through the three drawers without any real idea of what he’s looking for. A part of him expects to find an ominous green bottle with a comically large skull-and-crossbones emblazoned across it. But this is real life – this is his life – and he suspects that real poison looks nothing like it does in the cartoons.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do if he finds it. If he takes it, how long will it take his mother to notice it’s missing? Will she know he took it? What happens if she realises that he knows? Eddie’s walking a razor’s edge as it is, hiding the fact he hasn’t been eating all the while knowing that his mother must be wondering why he isn’t getting sick anymore. Eddie worries that she’ll think he’s building up a tolerance to the poison, that she’ll start adding even more, that he’ll slip up and eat something she gives him and just drop dead one day.

Whether he likes it or not, Eddie is coming to a tipping point, and he has no idea what to do when he does.

Downstairs, he hears the creak of the front door opening and he bolts from the room like the goddamn leper from Neibolt street is nipping at his heels. He scrambles across to his room and throws himself into his desk chair right as his mother’s cloying voice drifts up the stairs. “Eddie-bear?”

Soon, very soon, he knows there’ll be a tipping point. But it’s not today.

* * *

That night, after Richie wakes up from a bleary three-hour nap, uncomfortably warm and disoriented with his hair in utter disarray, he makes a few phone calls.

“Is there a reason,” says Bev the next day, arriving to lunch with Ben and Stan in tow, “that you asked me to bring you a whole box of goldfish crackers?”

Richie, the first one to lunch for once, shoots her a grin. “You’ll see,” he says.

Stan raises his eyebrows, sits himself down across from Richie, legs crossed neatly. “Does it have anything to do with why you told me to bring you as many apples as I could carry? ‘Cus my mom had some questions when she saw me this morning.”

Richie just shrugs. “I have my reasons.”

“Are you going for some kind of record?” asks Ben. “You know the human stomach can only hold so much food.”

“Yeah, I don’t wanna watch you puke up an entire bushel of apples,” says Stan.

Richie waves these concerns aside. “Ye of little faith! All will be explained, my good fellow.”

“I’m so sick of the British guy,” Stan mutters. Richie charitably ignores this, because his British voice is excellent and everyone knows it.

It doesn’t take long for the rest of the losers to appear. Eddie is the last one there and it’s almost embarrassing the way Richie’s whole body unclenches at the sight of him. Like, he saw Eddie literally this morning. He knows the guy is still alive. It’s not like he was gonna keel over in the middle of science class.

Still, though.

“Eddie! Welcome, welcome.”

Eddie peers at him with narrowed eyes, and the suspicion is probably warranted. It’s not every day Richie welcomes his friends to the lunch that they share on a regular basis as though it’s a secret meeting over which they will discuss the fate of the world. Still, he drops to the ground beside Richie, for once not making a fuss about grass stains.

“You good?” murmurs Richie.

Eddie’s jaw tightens. His shoulders are tense. “I’m fine.”

“I thought we could- you know.” Richie can’t find the words, can’t make himself say the sentence _I thought we could tell our friends all about how your mom’s trying to kill you_ out loud. "Today."

“Now?” Eddie’s eyes are wide.

“Yeah, I mean. If you want to.” There’s not really going to be a better opportunity, not with Eddie grounded for the foreseeable future.

It couldn’t be more obvious that Eddie very much Does Not Want To, but he nods. “I guess so.” What a fucking trooper.

Bill is frowning at them. “Guys? What’s g-g-going on?” This draws the attention of the others, who break from their individual conversations to look at the three of them.

“I, uh.” Eddie twists his hands together in his lap and shoots a glance at Richie. “I need to tell you guys something, and I need you to promise not to laugh, or, or call me crazy, because me and Richie tested it, okay, so” –

“Eddie,” Mike interrupts. Firm, but not unkind. “What are you talking about?”

A shaky exhale. “Okay, so.” A hand tugs at his hair, and Richie reaches out to grab his wrist, to stop him. Eddie’s grip on his hair loosens, his hand slack. “We kind of think my mom is trying to poison me.”

The fallout from this is predictably chaotic.

“_What?_” All of them in perfect chorus right before they start clamouring over each other.

“What do you mean _poison” –_

“-Why would you think that she’s” –

“-Oh my God, are you okay, Eddie?”

“-Of course he’s not okay, did you even hear what he said” -

Eddie is looking paler and smaller, shrinking into himself, hands clutching at his elbows, eyes darting from one loser to the next as he tries to take in their responses. He looks wary; wondering which of them think he’s a liar, knowing Eddie.

“Okay, shut up!” shouts Richie, cutting through the discord. Silence falls. The trashmouth strikes again. Sometimes it really is a gift.

“All right,” he says. He shuffles closer to Eddie, props an elbow on his shoulder like this is any other conversation. “Here’s what we know.” He walks them through the last two hellish days, their plan to switch lunches and the aftermath, and the losers stare at him, a row of ashen, wide-eyed faces. Eddie doesn’t look up, gaze resolutely focused on his hands.

“So we’re kind of… stuck,” Richie finishes lamely. “I mean, we don't really know where to go from here. What are we supposed to do?”

“We have to tell the police!” Stan says, like he can’t believe they’re having this conversation. “She’s trying to _hurt _Eddie.”

“I don’t want her to get _arrested_!” Eddie protests.

“Eddie,” Bill says. Softly softly, the classic Bill approach. Eddie’s shoulders slump a little even just hearing him say his name. “We can’t let her keep d-d-doing this.”

“I know,” Eddie says. His voice is high, wobbly. “But what happens to me if she goes to prison?”

There’s silence, then. Eddie’s dad is dead. They all know this – well, Richie, Bill and Stan do. How much Eddie has told the others, Richie’s not sure. He died years ago, and all that time it’s just been Eddie and his mom, alone in that house.

“Maybe I can talk to her,” Eddie says, when nobody has an answer to this.

Richie snorts. “Eds,” he says, “she’s fucking crazy.” Bill glares daggers at him, the _beep beep Richie _going unspoken, but Eddie just nods.

“I know,” he says. “But I don’t know what else to _do_! I tried to find it last night, you know, the poison, but I don’t know what she’s using, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for, it could be anything and,” and he’s wheezing again, on the brink of yet another asthma attack. A hand goes to his chest, the other one stretching out to clutch at Richie’s shoulder. Richie jolts at the contact, the sudden warmth, and his hand moves automatically to cover Eddie’s. His heart is pounding and he reaches for Eddie’s inhaler again, but this time Eddie seems able to wrestle his lungs under control. His breathing steadies and his hand drops from Richie’s shoulder.

There’s silence for a moment and then the others scramble towards Eddie, synchronised as though following some basal human instinct to comfort him, engulfing him – and, by extension, Richie – in a huge group hug. Their limbs tangle together, elbows nudging ribs and knees knocking and hair tickling noses, but when they break apart Eddie’s smiling.

“Thanks, guys,” he says quietly.

“Maybe we should go to the library,” says Ben, settling himself down again a gentlemanly two feet away from Beverly.

Richie raises his eyebrows. “Because that’s your answer to everything?”

Ben is unfazed, as always. “No,” he says. “We could do research. If Eddie tells us what symptoms he had when he was eating his mom’s food, maybe we can work out what she’s using.”

This, in Richie’s mind, does not solve the issue that she is using any kind of poison in the first place, but Eddie nods. “I can do that,” he says, and fuck. If Eddie doesn’t want to tell the police anything, if Eddie wants to stay with his crazy mom and just try and keep her crazy under control, well. It’s a really fucking bad idea, but what can they do? Richie feels very young and very helpless, for all that he’s the oldest he’s ever been.

They make plans to go to the library after school – everyone except Eddie, who has to go straight home but promises to give Ben a list of symptoms before the end of the day – and, well. That’s that. Eddie's mom will keep trying to poison him and they'll all dick around in the library trying to work out what she's using to do it.

“So is this why you told me to b-b-bring a family-sized bag of p-pretzels in today?” asks Bill when all this has been settled, pulling said bag out of his backpack.

Eddie looks at him, eyebrows raised. “What the fuck?”

Grinning, Richie remembers his plan from the night before. “Oh! Right!” He throws his arms wide, _ta-dah! _and the others blink at him. “Well, I was thinking, Eduardo here can’t eat the food at his house, so we’ll just have to feed him ourselves.”

The others are nodding, for once in perfect agreement with one of Richie’s genius ideas, and Eddie stares at them all slack-jawed. “Guys, you don’t have to do that,” he says. In response, Bill throws the bag of pretzels at his head, and Stan follows this up with one, two, three, four, five crisp red apples. Bev just places the crackers down in front of him because she’s too much of an angel to kick Eddie while he’s down, and Mike produces a sandwich and a banana that he tosses into Eddie's lap. Ben tops this off with a whole packet of cupcakes.

“C’mon, Eddie,” says Richie, ruffling Eddie’s hair as the other boy slaps his hands away. “We’d never let our little stray go hungry.”

Eddie wrinkles his nose. There’s a pink flush seeping into his cheeks. He opens his mouth like he’s going to protest, but all he says is, “Thanks, guys.” He stares down at the pile of food which, in retrospect, is enough to feed a small army. “How am I gonna get all this home without my mom seeing?”

Richie has already thought of this. “I’ll climb through your window, dude! Delivery right to your doorstep.”

“Window step,” Stan says.

Richie narrows his eyes at him but concedes, “Window step.”

Eddie has gone silent. If he cries again, Richie is going to lose it, so he says, “No more arguments, Eddie Spaghetti!”

“Right,” Beverly says, with that soft smile of hers. She brushes a strand of hair from her eyes. “What are friends for? You’d do the same for us, Eddie.”

This is true. Richie has watched this kid crawl down a well with one functioning arm and kick the shit out of a demon clown for his friends. They all did that, together. Why Eddie thinks they wouldn’t _feed him_ is beyond Richie’s comprehension. Eddie really can be an idiot.

They spend the rest of lunch sharing pretzels and arguing about who brought the best snacks and how many bones Richie is gonna break scaling the side of Eddie’s house, and when the bell rings, Eddie seems lighter. Not light – Eddie has never been light. Even before It, before the poison, he was always weighed down by his own anxieties. But he's lighter than he was.

Richie prays that between them all, they can keep him that way.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UM how SWEET are you guys?? Thank you thank you for all your wonderful comments and kudos - it's so nice to get home from a tiring day at work and find all of your lovely responses. It makes me so happy that y'all are enjoying this, I hope I don't disappoint with this next chapter.
> 
> Also maybe worth mentioning that I'm on Tumblr. I don't post much in the way of original content but if anyone wants to come and be friends and possibly scream about IT with me then come on down, my url is bisexual-zombies <3
> 
> Anyway, here's chapter four! I'm, uh. Not very nice to Eddie in this.

“Eddie-bear, dinner’s ready!”

Stomach churning, Eddie puts down his pen. He hasn’t really made any progress on his homework, brimming over as he is with nervous energy. His skin feels too tight for his body, like he could vibrate out of it at any moment. If he’s lucky Ben will let him copy his work. Richie would let him in a heartbeat, of course, but Ben’s writing is much easier to read than Richie’s awful chicken scratch.

On autopilot, he stands up, his legs taking him downstairs to the living-slash-dining room where his mom waits for him. He slips into his usual seat, eyes down.

A plate of spaghetti appears in front of him. He looks at it and swallows. Gentle spools of steam rise into the air. The spaghetti glistens, coated in thick red sauce, viscous globules of it catching the dim light. It makes Eddie think of intestines, of the way Ben looked after the clown sliced him clean open, even though they didn’t really see much more than a little blood and Eddie had been much more concerned with his own broken bone at the time. He’s not sure he could eat this even without knowing what was in it.

The chair opposite him creaks as his mom lowers herself into it. For the first time, Eddie notices it.

Silence.

The TV is off.

“Ma?” Eddie hates the way his voice turns soft and conciliatory. He’s always shrinking himself down for her. “Don’t you want to watch your stories?”

His mom smiles at him. It doesn’t reach her eyes. “Well, you’re always saying we should switch the television off once in a while, Eddie. I just thought, well! It’s been so long since we’ve had a proper conversation. You’re always out with those _friends _of yours.” She says _friends _like it’s a filthy word. It brings to mind those awful dark weeks during the summer, locked away in his house with his perfectly clean cast, wondering what his friends were doing. Wondering if they were okay. If they missed him. Has Beverly forgiven him for those awful things his mom said to her? He never even asked.

He doesn’t say any of this. “I like my friends, Ma,” he says instead. Her smile drops, and he hastens to add, “but dinner together sounds nice.” He can’t keep himself from placating her; it’s a lifetime of doing so, of being the sole subject of his mother’s laser-intense love, versus mere weeks of knowing her for the liar she is. It’s gravity, drawing them back into the roles they’ve been playing since Eddie was a child.

Somehow, he ends up with a forkful of spaghetti hovering inches away from his face. His hand trembles and he nearly loses his grip on the fork, the weight of his mother’s gaze heavy on him.

God. He’s so fucking weak. Is he seriously going to eat this? Who knows what it’ll do to him? It’s been at least a week since Eddie ate anything his mom had prepared for him. What if she’s changed it? What if she’s added even more? He was barely walking around as it was last time.

“Eat up, Eddie-bear,” says his mom. Her gaze hasn’t shifted from him once. “You’re so thin lately! I’m worried about you. I think Doctor Brennan should take another look at you. I swear I don’t know who gave that man his medical licence.”

Eddie wants to cry. He closes his eyes and takes a breath in. She can’t know he knows. Not yet.

He nearly chokes on the first mouthful and has to wash it down with half a glass of water, his mother flapping and squawking and, “Oh, Eddie, are you alright? Do you need your inhaler? Oh, I _wish _you’d keep it with you, Eddie-bear, you know how you need it…”

“I’m fine, Ma,” says Eddie. “It just went down the wrong way, that’s all.” It’s all the wrong way. There’s no right way to eat poison. But his mother subsides, settling down to her own plate of food.

For a few minutes there’s only the clinking of cutlery against the plates. Eddie’s mind is racing. Maybe he can excuse himself and somehow puke up the whole meal before it gets into his system – but his mom is so attuned to him right now he can’t do so much as scratch his ear without it drawing her attention. There’s no way she wouldn’t notice him throwing up his whole dinner, and she’d just use _that _as proof he’s sick. Either way, he’s fucked, but if he makes himself sick, he could tip her off. He still hasn’t worked out what’ll happen when she finds out he knows. What she might do to keep him from telling anyone else.

Until he comes up with a plan, there’s no way out of this. He has to eat it.

Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe he can power through it, pretend he doesn’t feel anything. Maybe if he’s strong enough for long enough his mom will just… give up. Stop trying to hurt him and accept that Eddie isn’t the weak little thing she wants him to be. Maybe she’ll loosen her grip, like she did for those few blessed days that summer after Eddie had yelled at her, stormed out of the house to save his friends with his heart in his throat and his mother’s cries in his ears.

He clears his plate.

His mom looks at him with a glint in her eyes, a satisfied smile on her face. “There we go,” she says. “Now you’ll grow up big and strong.”

He might not grow up at all. Eddie’s stomach churns, and he thinks he might not be able to keep his dinner down after all. “May I be excused?” he says at last. His voice is quiet. Such a fucking mouse. “I have homework.”

An approving nod, and his mother moves towards him. Eddie’s whole body tenses, ramrod straight, and she frowns at him. Her hand is hot on his shoulder, and when she leans in to kiss his cheek her breath is the same. “Of course,” she says. “Study hard.”

“I will,” says Eddie. He hopes his friends are doing the same.

* * *

Click. Click. Click. Click.

“Will you _stop doing that?_” Stanley slams the book he’s holding open down on the table and glares at Richie.

Richie blinks. He looks at his hand, where he realises he’s spent the past two minutes clicking his pen non-stop. “Huh,” he says. “Sorry.”

Stan rolls his eyes and returns to his book – _The Encyclopedia of Common Diseases_, easily a thousand pages long. Like Eddie has a disease. Richie swallows and stares back down at the piece of paper in front of him, refocusing his gaze. He needs to pay attention, they’re here to help Eddie, but it’s so hard to do that when he isn’t here with them. Is he okay? Has his mom said anything to him, done anything to him? Eddie took as much food as he could hide in his backpack with him today and Richie isn’t scheduled to drop any more through his window until tomorrow, but he’s thinking about moving that forward to tonight.

He sucks in a deep breath through his nose. A glance from Bev tells him his anxiety isn’t as surreptitious as he’d hoped, but he doesn’t look up at her. The list in front of him occupies his whole attention span.

Eddie has written in his neat, precise handwriting a list of grisly symptoms even longer than Richie had expected. It doesn’t help one bit the way he had earnestly explained to them that “I never had them all at once, and it’s really not as bad as it seems, but you asked for all of the symptoms, so” –

  * _Vomiting_
  * _Cramps_
  * _Headaches_
  * _Photophobia _– “What the fuck is photophobia?” “When it hurts to look at light, Richie,” Ben had said patiently –
  * _Fatigue_
  * _General malaise_
  * _Coughing up blood (ONLY ONCE!!!) _Eddie has emphasised, like that makes it any fucking better.

He’s been so clinical about it that Richie feels nausea burning in the pit of his stomach. The words are matter of fact, a collection of unpleasant sensations that Richie would only ever wish on someone like Henry Bowers.

They’ve been at this for an hour and Richie wants to help Eddie, he really does, but his mind isn’t here in the library. It’s in Eddie’s house.

“Anybody find anything?” Beverly asks, just as Richie’s frustration reaches boiling point, her voice cutting off the scream that’s bubbling up inside him.

There’s a collective sigh. “I’ve g-got a few options,” says Bill, tapping his pen against the paper he’s set out in front of himself.

“Me too,” says Ben, but he’s frowning. “It’s just- it could be almost anything. These symptoms are so varied, and it really does sound like he’s just… sick.”

“He’s not _sick,_” snaps Richie.

Ben holds his hands up in surrender even as Bev shoots Richie a warning look. “I’m not saying he is,” Ben says. “I believe you guys. I’m just saying his mom is doing a really good job of making it look like he is.”

“Awesome,” Richie huffs out. So not only is she _poisoning _Eddie, she’s doing it so well that no one would ever suspect poor, delicate Eddie Kaspbrak wasn’t just sick.

“I don’t get it,” says Stan. His brow is creased in thought. “She wants to make him sick, right? But if she takes him to a doctor, surely they’ll do – tests, or something. Wouldn’t whatever she’s using show up in his system?”

“M-m-maybe that’s why she hasn’t taken him to the d-d-doctor yet,” says Bill.

“Right, but that’s my point!” Stan throws his hands out. “Mrs K takes Eddie to the emergency room every time he gets a hangnail. Isn’t it kind of weird that she hasn’t yet?”

“Is there anything about this that isn’t weird?” Mike asks. “I don’t think we should try and make sense of what Eddie’s mom is doing.”

“Right!” Richie nods, grateful for Mike’s level head. “There is no making sense of that woman. What we _need _to do is get Eddie out of there.”

“But he doesn’t want us to tell,” Beverly says. “I think we have to respect that. We don’t know what will happen to him if his mom gets taken away. He might have to leave.”

He might have to leave.

Richie swallows. Him and Eddie and Bill and Stanley have been friends since kindergarten, ever since Richie fell over on the playground during kickball and Eddie, even tinier and wheezier than he is these days, not allowed to play kickball because his mom said it was too dangerous, had come running over with his fanny pack of band-aids and kissed Richie’s scraped knee better, lecturing him all the while with big words like _infection _and _gangrene._

They’ve moved on from kissing things better, these days, and this wound is too big for Richie’s touch to soothe. The idea of a life without Eddie, though, is incomprehensible to him. What _would _happen to Eddie if they turned his mom in?

“But if we don’t tell she’s just gonna keep hurting him,” says Stan.

Beverly swallows, tracing her finger across the glossed wood of the table. “Maybe that’s his call to make.”

The boys all stare at her. Honestly, Richie has been kind of absorbed with his own post-clown nightmares and thinking about Eddie and working on his newest Voice (he’s a Russian spy, and it’s hilarious), but even he has noticed there’s something Bev isn’t telling them. He might wear glasses but he isn’t actually blind.

All told, Bev has been their friend for maybe two months. She doesn’t owe them anything, and Richie isn’t expecting her life story or anything, but between these little comments she makes sometimes and the way her dad mysteriously disappeared, her aunt moving here from Portland to take his place – well. _Something _happened this summer. Something that wasn’t that fucking clown.

“We can’t let him do that, though,” Stanley says. “We’re his friends!”

This triggers a spate of hushed arguments that have the crotchety librarian glaring at him suspiciously from where she is re-shelving books several aisles down.

From what Richie can make out, they’re pretty evenly split. Stanley and Ben think they should tell someone. Beverly and Mike think they need to respect Eddie’s wishes. Richie looks over at Bill and finds his oldest friend staring back at him helplessly, eyes wide.

Bill might hate the role, but he is kind of the de facto leader of the Losers Club. They all admire him, even Richie, for all his jokes. There’s a kind of steadiness to Bill that their group needs. He’s their safe harbour, calm where Richie and Eddie are chaotic, brave where Stanley and Richie are afraid, fierce where Ben is timid. Of course, he’s also reckless and a bit of a dumbass, but that’s pretty much mandatory to be a member of the Losers Club. The fact that Bill doesn’t know what to do either sets off an anxious squirming sensation in Richie’s stomach like his intestines have been replaced with live worms.

For now, they table it and go back to the books, but Richie can’t stop seeing the raw, scared look on Bill’s face. They’re so fucked.

* * *

Eddie throws up twice on the way to school.

The first time, he makes it all the way down the road and around the corner before he has to stop and puke into Mrs Waller’s begonias. From here, he staggers nearly the entire way to school, vaguely aware of his shaking legs and the black spots floating in and out of his vision. It isn’t until he’s maybe five minutes away that he has to stop again, the churning in his stomach too much, and he empties what little is left in his stomach into the trash can on the corner of Bassey Park.

He stands there for a moment, hands clutching the sides of the trash can, germs probably swarming him, no doubt he’ll end up with norovirus or listeria or-

He sucks in a deep breath. It’s high, more quivery than he’d like, but he’s breathing. Now he just has to make it to school and somehow not let on to anyone that he voluntarily ate poison last night. What the others would say, what Richie would say if they knew what a weakling he was… he doesn’t want to find out.

Last night, his eyes full of tears and his stomach full of God-knows-what, Eddie had sat down at his desk and made a Plan.

Eddie likes to have plans. He likes to know that he’s ready for any eventuality. In this case, ‘any eventuality’ is grisly as fuck, but he still wants to be ready. He wants to know what to do.

So last night he sat at his desk, turned over the unfinished biology worksheet he spent the whole evening not working on, and started to write. Today that worksheet is crumpled at the bottom of his backpack where his mom won’t find it. He’s getting a fail on this homework whether he hands it in or not, but at least now he has some ideas. A contingency plan, something in the back of his mind that he thinks hopes prays might help. He’s made up his mind not to tell the others about this, not yet, not so soon after his latest episode of neediness. They all have lives, after all.

Somehow, he finds himself standing in front of the school. The building seems taller than normal, looming over him, and the shouting and laughter and traffic that he can normally tune out are like knives in his ears. He puts a shaky hand to his head, trying to calm the pounding, and squints out at the crowd of students to see if he can spot his friends.

There. By the bike racks, he sees Richie locking up his bike and disappearing round the corner where the other losers are. There’s some steps leading out from the old fire escape that Eddie and Richie snuck out of only a few days ago. Bev likes to hide there to smoke before classes, and if they get there early enough the other losers will usually join her – although Stan is always careful to stand upwind of her smoke, and Eddie doesn’t like it very much because it makes his lungs clench up in a way that he’s not always certain is just in his head.

One foot in front of the other. That’s all he has to do. He’s been doing it for nearly his entire life, it’s not hard. Eddie takes a shaky breath and makes a concerted effort to stand up straight, to look like somebody who didn’t hurl his guts up two times before it even hit 9am.

He walks around the corner. Mike, Stan, Bill and Ben are perched on the steps, watching as Bev lights up the cigarette in Richie’s hands.

“Hey guys,” says Eddie. That’s good. Normal-sounding. They all look up at him, and jaws drop. Richie’s hand goes slack, the cigarette dropping to the ground where it smoulders against the concrete.

“_Eddie_,” says Bev. Her voice has that awful cracked quality to it that Eddie remembers from the cistern beneath Neibolt.

“What?” says Eddie. He shifts, not liking the way all of their gazes are focused on him. He doesn’t like being looked at, not even by his friends, not like this.

As one, they scramble to their feet and rush over to him. All of them except Richie. They all crowd around him, someone’s hand between his shoulder blades, Bev soft soft soft as she touches a palm to his forehead (and he remembers the way he had been cold and shaky and sweaty and hopes Bev doesn’t come away with her hand slick and gross), all of them chattering away at him. Eddie sways, bile rising in his throat.

“Guys!” That’s Richie, his voice cutting through the haze. “Give him some space, c’mon.”

Eddie lets Bev lead him to the steps. They sit down, the others surrounding him but not suffocating this time, and Bev stubs her cigarette out. She must mean business.

Richie crouches down in front of Eddie, and though his eyes are magnified behind his ridiculous lenses Eddie can’t for the life of him read his expression.

“Eds,” he says. His voice is gentler than Eddie has ever really heard it. “What happened?”

Eddie swallows. He wants to bury his face in his knees and not look at any of them. He wants to die of shame. He can’t, absolutely _cannot_ explain to his friends that he sat down at the dinner table and ate poison because he was too terrified to stand up to his mother. Because he didn’t know what would happen if he did. But Richie is looking at him with that _face _and the others are surrounding him, warm and so concerned, and then Richie rests a hand on Eddie’s leg, his body heat seeping into him.

“Ma turned the TV off,” Eddie says. Richie’s face drops. “She was watching me eat.” The words come quicker now. It’s a familiar sensation to Eddie, the way the words well up inside him and come flooding out before he’s even had a chance to consider them. “I didn’t know what else to do, and I was gonna throw it back up but then I thought she’d notice that and make me stay home sick so I thought it’d be better if I just pretend nothing happened and I’m fine, so uh. I think we should go to English class now.”

There’s a silence, then, “Eddie, you can’t go to fucking English class! You look like you’re about to drop dead!”

“Richie,” says Eddie. He’s not sure how that sentence was going to end.

“Eddie, you need to see the nurse,” says Stan, and Eddie shakes his head so rapidly he feels dizzy and has to pause for a second.

“No. No way,” he says. “The nurse will call my mom. I don’t want her knowing about this.”

“So you’re just g-g-gonna pretend that you’re fine?”

“Eddie, you can’t be at school right now,” Ben says. “You need to rest.”

“Thank you!” Richie throws his hands up in frustration. Eddie feels very small, wrings his hands together in his lap, but beneath that is the familiar prickle of hot anger, and that’s much much easier to cling to.

“Fuck you guys,” he says. “You don’t get it.” He rockets to his feet and immediately regrets it when the world starts to wobble, fading in and out of focus, but he manages to put one foot in front of the other long enough to storm – stagger, really – away in a cloud of rage. Part of him knows he’s being ridiculous, that they’re his friends and they care about him, but he just feels so _awful. _For all his pills, Eddie has never really been sick that often, and this is worse than anything he’s felt before. It’s hard to be understanding when all he really wants to do is pass out and forget about the world.

Behind him, he hears a soft, “Shit.” Then, louder, “Eddie! Wait! Eds!”

Richie comes flying up behind him. Eddie turns to look at him, has to squint to focus on his face. Richie’s glasses are slipping down his nose and his hand itches to reach up and adjust them, but Richie beats him to it. “I’m sorry, okay?” Richie says. “But this is fucking crazy, Eddie.”

Eddie stares at him. “I know,” he says. “But I don’t have another option. If I ditch again, the school will call my mom. If I go to the nurse, she’ll call my mom. If I stay home-”

Richie’s face tightens. “Okay,” he says. “Fine. But you’re not walking around on your own today. You look like you’ll collapse if I fucking breathe on you too hard.”

“Don’t breathe on me then,” says Eddie, falling back into their familiar rhythm. “I don’t want your germs anyway.”

Richie doesn’t respond to this except to take Eddie’s arm and loop it over his shoulders. “Just lean on me, okay, dumbass?”

They’ve done this a million times, arms around each other’s shoulders. There’s no reason to be embarrassed, but as Richie leads them towards Mrs Turner’s classroom he feels a warm flush crawling up his neck.

He hopes he’s not developing a fever.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello hello! Here's chapter five. Please be aware that there is some discussion of the abuse that Bev suffered from her dad - nothing more explicit than the movie, but take care.
> 
> As ever, thank you thank you thank you for all of your lovely responses! Your comments and kudos make me smile so much and encourage me to keep writing this crazy little angstfest. And again, I have not yet started on the next chapter, so read slow. I'll be back!

Richie hasn’t heard a word any of his teachers have said all morning. Every sound they make sounds like the goddamn teacher from _Peanuts_, just _wahwahwahwah_ing away at him. How could he listen to anything they say when, at the desk beside his own, Eddie is dying?

Eddie would be annoyed if he knew what Richie was thinking, but he can’t help it. Eddie just looks so fucking bad. When he’d walked up to them this morning, Richie swore his heart had seized up. Eddie looked fucking haggard, dark circles under his eyes, hair a mess, his body trembling and his throat working like he was trying to keep his stomach from turning itself inside out.

Mrs K was a dead woman.

He whiles away his morning classes by alternating between fantasising about stabbing his pen into Mrs K’s neck and staring at Eddie to make sure he’s still conscious. Eddie is slumped over in his chair, hand barely supporting his head where it’s propped up. Beads of sweat form on the back of his neck.

During this latest period of sustained staring, Eddie turns to look at him, eyebrows raised, a silent, _What?_

Richie rolls his eyes, nods towards Eddie and raises his eyebrows in return. _You, dipshit. You look terrible._

Eddie huffs out an irritated breath that seems to take most of his energy. Richie frowns and tries to refocus on the algebra that Mrs Warren is scribbling on the board, but factorisation is kind of taking a backseat to some bigger problems right now.

When the bell finally rings, Eddie is the last one out of his seat. Richie, swinging his backpack over his shoulder, ready to get the hell out of here, looks up to see that Eddie is only just standing to pack away his things. He’s swaying like a blade of grass on a windy day and for a moment Richie really thinks he’s going to topple over.

Richie moves to stand at his shoulder and takes the notepad from Eddie’s hands, slides it into his backpack. Silently, he packs away the rest of Eddie’s belongings. He can feel Eddie’s gaze on him like a sunburn. When he’s done, he zips the bag up and slings it over his shoulder.

“Richie!” Eddie protests. His voice is still weak enough that Richie won’t be listening to any of his arguments.

“Leave it, dude,” he says. “You’re about to keel over, and I’ve been looking for an opportunity to flex these muscles anyway.” He does so, flexes one skinny bicep at Eddie, who rolls his eyes and then makes a face like he really wishes he hadn’t. Still dizzy, then.

“You’re an asshole,” mutters Eddie. His cheeks are pink and he won’t meet Richie’s gaze, but Richie just grins at him and loops an arm around his shoulders.

“Come on, Eddie Spaghetti.”

“Not my name.” Each protest is weak, a bit hoarse, but infinitely better than the quiet fury Eddie had thrown at them that morning. And, okay, it’s not like a little anger isn’t justified under the circumstances, but if there’s one thing Richie has never been able to handle it’s Eddie being mad at him. It happens so rarely that they genuinely fall out that Richie never knows what to do with himself.

He’s about to poke the bear again as they join the other losers at their usual lunch spot. “I don’t think you should go home tonight,” he says, dropping his and Eddie’s bags to the ground.

Eddie wrinkles his nose. Richie hopes he's not gonna throw up again. “I don’t have a choice.” He drops to the grass like his ass is made of lead, not even putting a jacket down to protect him from grass stains like he usually does.

Richie sits down a little closer than is strictly necessary. Eddie really does look like he might keel over at any moment and Richie wants to be there to catch him. “But what if your mom turns off the TV again? I mean, I can’t believe she’d miss more than one episode of _Days of Our _fucking _Lives, _but these are crazy times we’re living in, Eds.” He opens his bag to unpack his lunch.

Eddie squints at him. It looks like it was supposed to be a glare, but Eddie doesn’t seem to have the energy today. Richie offers him half of his sandwich.

Eddie shakes his head. “I don’t think I can stomach anything today. And I don’t know what I’ll do if she watches me eat again, but if I don’t go home she’s gonna lose her shit. You know what she’s like.”

They do. Mrs K has always been militant about Eddie’s curfew, and though Eddie has spent half of his life pushing the boundaries she’s still pretty fucking likely to call the cops if he doesn’t come home on time.

“I think Richie’s right, Eddie,” says Stan.

“Yes!” crows Richie. “I knew it would happen sooner or later! Me and Stan the man are finally on the same page. That’s when you know shit’s getting real.”

“Think about it,” Stan ploughs on, ignoring Richie with what must be herculean effort. “She can’t actually _do _anything. She’s not gonna call the cops, not when she’s poisoning her own son.”

“And you’re already grounded,” Beverly adds. “What more can she do?”

_She could kill him_, Richie thinks, and shuts that thought down real fucking quick because whoa, where did that come from? Eddie’s not gonna die, especially not if they get him out of that hellhole sooner rather than later.

Eddie chews at his lip. “I can’t stay away forever, though.”

“Just for tonight, Eddie,” Ben says. “You need to rest someplace safe.”

There’s a general murmur of agreement that makes Eddie flush. “I guess,” he says. “I don’t know where I’d go.”

_This_, of course, cannot stand. “Uh, obviously my house, dumbass,” says Richie. He’s drowned out by the sound of five other losers offering up their place for the night.

Eddie blinks at them all in turn and smiles that tiny smile of his that makes Richie feel hot and cross and confused. He has the sudden urge to punch something, or- or. Or _something._

That feeling is problem for another day.

* * *

In the end, Eddie goes home with Beverly. Her aunt works late on Fridays so she doesn’t need to know Eddie’s even here, but according to Bev, “She’ll be cool with it, anyway.” It’s better than having to explain himself to the Toziers or the Denbroughs or the Urises, all of whom have known Eddie for years and know more about himself and his mother than he’d like.

Bev’s new place is much nicer than the dingy flat she shared with her father – and what happened there, Eddie has never asked, but it seems whatever it was was bad enough that Bev’s aunt decided to find herself a whole new place when she moved here from Portland. It’s a neat little bungalow on Jackson Street, with a porch out front that seats a cosy wicker loveseat and a hanging basket of ferns. Bev leads them inside where the décor is warm, soft yellows and pinks and oranges, a million miles away from the dank, bloodstained home that Eddie remembers.

Eddie follows Beverly to the back of the house where her bedroom is. He’s never been in a girl’s bedroom before, and he pauses for a moment in the doorway, but Beverly just raises her eyebrows at him and he follows her inside.

It’s not really all that different from any of the other losers’ bedrooms. Posters and drawings are tacked all over the walls, a well-loved keyboard is tucked away in one corner, and Beverly’s desk is covered with homework that Eddie strongly suspects she has yet to start. On top of the stacks of paper sits a polaroid camera, one Eddie has seen a few times before when Beverly whips it out to snap a picture of them all at the quarry, to get a candid of Mike cradling one of the chickens on his farm, to let Richie to squish his face up real close to the lens and make her take a photo. The only real difference in décor is that Beverly appears to have made her bed, the duvet neatly tucked in at the corners, a worn teddy bear propped up on the pillow. She drops down onto her bed and pats the space next to her. Eddie sits.

He doesn’t feel as awful as he did eight hours ago. The worst of the shaking has calmed, only the occasional tremor of his hand to remind him, and his stomach is just aching and cavernous rather than actively trying to turn itself inside out. All that’s really left is the leaden ache that weighs his muscles down, makes him feel slow as molasses, tempts him to fall asleep and stay there for the next hour day week month year lifetime.

Beverly doesn’t say anything. She just falls backwards so that her legs are dangling from the edge of the bed and the rest of her is looking up at the ceiling. Eddie sits and twists his fingers together in his lap. Now that he thinks about it, Eddie’s not sure he’s ever been alone with Beverly. It’s not bad, exactly – Beverly isn’t really a Girl so much as she is a Friend, so Eddie isn’t uncomfortable around her or anything, but it is a little strange to be sitting here with her without Bill and Ben taking it in turns to give her wistful stares, without Richie in the background cracking coarse jokes about Eddie’s mom.

The silence is so heavy that eventually Eddie takes it upon himself to break it. That’s probably what Beverly wanted in the first place. “I don’t think I ever said anything to you,” he says. “About what my mom said to you. You know. After Neibolt.” He glances down at Beverly, whose eyebrows have shot up towards her hairline. A ghost of a smile is forming on her face as he rushes out, “I’m sorry. I should have- she shouldn’t have said that to you. It was really awful.” He stares down at his hands, feeling stupid for reasons he can’t quite articulate.

“Eddie,” says Beverly. Her voice is like stepping into a warm bath. “It’s okay. I know what people say about me.”

Eddie flushes. “Well, they shouldn’t! Especially not my own mom. It’s bullshit.” He shoots another look at her and finds Beverly looking back. She looks relaxed, still, smiling up at him.

“It’s okay,” she says. “Really.”

It’s really not. Their conversation brings Eddie back to that day, sitting in the passenger seat of his mother’s car, the leather seats sticking to his bare thighs, tears streaming down his face, clutching his broken arm to his chest with the pain a steady throbbing awfulness. He had been able to feel his mother’s harsh grip on his arm for hours after she had first hauled him into the car and away from his friends, although it never left a bruise. Psychosomatic, Eddie thinks, just like almost every other problem he’s ever had.

Eddie swallows. “I just didn’t want you to think that I… thought that,” he finishes lamely. He’s probably butchered this conversation; Bill would have handled it ten times better, stutter and all, but it needs to be him.

Beverly’s smile widens, a flash of perfect white teeth. It’s not the first time Eddie has noticed Beverly is pretty – he’d have to be a blind man not to see, but she’s not pretty like- like somebody he’d want to date, she’s pretty like a sunset, or a flower. Not that Eddie has much patience for flowers, not with his allergies (oh, wait), but still. It’s just a fact.

“Thanks, Eddie,” she says at last. She tugs gently on his wrist. “Come on, lie down. You need to rest.”

Eddie snorts. “Okay, Mom.” But he falls backwards next to Beverly. Lying here next to her, staring up at the empty white ceiling, he feels something in his chest loosen. This whole day has just been – so much. He hates having to pretend he’s okay. He hates the fact that he’s really not even a little bit okay. The Losers Club’s concern made him feel warm and safe and cared for, but there’s no getting away from the awful slippery pit of guilt that forms in his chest. He did this to himself. He ate that poison. Nobody pinched his nose shut and shoved the food down his mouth. He doesn’t deserve their sympathy.

“Eddie?” Beverly says, and Eddie is jolted out of his thoughts. He turns his head to look at her, but Beverly isn’t looking back. Her gaze is fixedly, determinedly focused on the ceiling.

“Yeah?”

“I’m gonna tell you something, okay?”

Eddie’s throat tightens. What if she tells him that he can’t stay here, that he needs to go home and take care of this himself, that they’re all sick of listening to him whine and – “Okay,” he says.

“I’ve never told anybody,” says Beverly. She’s still not looking at him. “Not really.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” says Eddie, because it seems like this is what she wants to hear. Beverly nods, but it’s automatic. She hasn’t really heard him.

“It’s about my dad,” says Beverly, her voice almost a whisper now. Eddie feels the guilty pit in his chest start to widen, his whole ribcage just one gaping cavity now, barely functioning lungs exposed to the open air. How could he have thought this was about _him?_ They’ve all had their suspicions about Bev’s dad – after the way he disappeared, how could they not? – but this is the first Beverly has spoken about it. And she’s speaking to _Eddie._ He reaches out, tentatively, and brushes his fingers against Beverly’s wrist.

She draws in a shuddering breath. “He used to hurt me,” she says, finally. “Badly. He used to – he said I reminded him of my mother.”

Eddie freezes. What the fuck does he say to that? Silent, he turns the brush of his fingers into a gentle grip around Beverly’s wrist. _I’m here. _Beverly doesn’t provide any more detail, and Eddie is selfishly grateful for that, but he can read between the lines well enough, and fury wells up inside him at the idea of one of his friends being hurt like that. He thinks back to those hazy days of the summer, of Beverly’s anxiety about her dad finding out she’d had boys in the apartment, of the way she looked sometimes, small and a little bit scared, of the way she gravitated towards Bill like a ship to a lighthouse – and okay, that last one isn’t so unusual, but still. They should have noticed _something._

Beverly breathes out through her mouth, shaky. “He’s gone now,” she says. “I stopped him. He was trying to hurt me again and I… I fought back. It was just before _It _got me. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I stopped it.”

Eddie stares at her, and she finally turns her head to meet his gaze. “Beverly,” says Eddie. The rest of the words won’t come.

She smiles at him, her eyes glossy with tears. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay now, Eddie. He can’t hurt me anymore,” she says, and Eddie is in awe of this girl, this beautiful, powerful girl who is stronger than Eddie has ever dreamed of being.

“You stopped him,” Eddie repeats, like a prayer. “That’s… you’re amazing, Beverly.” He wants to cringe – he sounds like Bill, like Ben, but he doesn’t mean it like that.

Beverly nods. “You’re the only person I’ve told.” She twists her hand to grab his wrist in return, a facsimile of hand-holding that is somehow even more intimate, and her hands are soft, not calloused the way Richie’s or the other boys’ are.

“Thanks for telling me,” Eddie says. “But, uh… Why? I mean, I just thought- wouldn’t you rather tell Bill, or, or Ben, or…” He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. Beverly knows as well as he does – they’re friends, but neither of them are the closest in the group.

“I think you need to hear it,” Beverly says. “I know it’s not the same, my dad and your mom. I mean, my dad never tried to actually- well. I just didn’t want you to think you were alone.”

Eddie feels sick again. “It’s not the same at all,” he says. “What your dad did to you… I mean, my mom hasn’t really _done _anything. I’m the one who ate that food last night. I had a choice.”

The bedsheets rustle as Beverly sits upright. She looks down at him, copper curls falling into her eyes which are flint hard, her brow creased into a frown. “Eddie,” she says, and finally crosses the line that neither of them has yet dared to put a toe across. “It’s abuse.”

Eddie closes his eyes against the tears that well up, not wanting to see Beverly’s face anymore. The maelstrom of concern and anger and misery is something he can’t make himself look at. “It’s not the same!” he says. The burning in his eyes intensifies. He can’t believe that Beverly is putting the awful things her dad did to her on the same level as what his mom is trying to do. “She’s never even touched me.”

“Sometimes that’s worse,” says Beverly, and the dull note to her voice coaxes Eddie into opening his eyes. “The things he would say to me… sometimes I thought I’d be able to stand everything he did if he’d only _shut the fuck up._” She’s hugging herself now, hands digging into her arms, knuckles white. Cautious, Eddie sits up and pulls her hands away, and she lets him drop them into her lap. When she meets his eyes, she’s firm. “She doesn’t have to touch you for it to be abuse. You know what she’s doing is wrong.”

He does. That’s the awful thing. No loving parent would ever do something like this. Eddie can’t forget the way his mother had sat there the night before, her eyes hard and cold, and watched him swallow mouthful after mouthful of poison.

Before he knows it, he’s on his feet and flying down the hallway, slamming doors open until he finds the bathroom and falls to his knees in front of the toilet just in time for his stomach to empty itself. He hasn’t eaten anything all day so it’s mostly bile that burns at his throat and brings tears to his eyes, and he clings to the cold porcelain and shakes, his stomach cramping, knees aching from the harsh drop to the tile floor.

The hand on his back startles him, but when he whips his head around to look it’s only Bev. Of course it is. He sags, his whole body slumping, and Beverly rubs gentle circles between his shoulder blades. She sinks down to the floor next to him and is nice enough to not say anything about the tears that stream from his eyes.

When he finally calms, Beverly is there with a glass of water. Eddie sips at it, desperate to wash away the sour taste in his mouth but equally desperate to not throw up again today. Doesn’t that rot your teeth? What if he throws up so much that his teeth are riddled with cavities and he has to have them all removed? What if the dentist decides he’s allergic and that they’ll have to do it without anaesthetic?

“Eddie!”

Eddie looks up. Beverly is staring at him, and from the look on her face she’s been calling his name for quite some time. “Sorry,” he says. He feels like he’s watching the scene unfold from outside his body.

“Come on,” says Beverly. She grabs his arm and hauls him to his feet. She’s still a few inches taller than him – _girls hit their growth spurts first,_ Eddie reminds himself – and easily strong enough to help him stumble back down the hallway to her bedroom, where she makes him lie down. His head sinks into the pillow and Beverly lies down next to him. “Sleep, Eddie,” she says, like she can see the way the gears inside Eddie’s head are whirring away. She brushes a strand of hair away from his eyes. “My aunt won’t mind.”

And, squeezed onto the bed with probably the only girl Eddie has ever felt at ease with, Eddie finally, finally gives into his exhaustion and lets himself drift away.

* * *

It’s dark when he wakes up, Beverly a warm weight on the mattress beside him. Her breathing is even and steady, and it takes Eddie a moment to realise what it is that awoke him. There are footsteps in the hallway.

Beverly’s aunt must be home.

Eddie holds his breath as the footsteps pause outside the door and then keep moving. There’s the creak of another door swinging open. The rustling and creaking and running of water go on for another ten minutes or so during which Eddie sits upright on the bed, tense and silent, not daring to move even though Beverly said it was okay for him to be here.

Finally, the house is silent again, and Eddie exhales. His eyes have adjusted to the darkness by now and he can make out the silhouettes of Beverly’s furniture, illuminated by the sliver of moonlight that creeps through the gap in the curtains. It’s late, but it’s too dark to read the clock. The world is quiet and timeless and despite Beverly’s presence beside him Eddie feels truly alone for the first time in days. It’s nice.

He sits there and breathes, revels in the way the air travels clean and clear through his airways, no hint of a wheeze, and he thinks.

Beverly telling him about her dad was maybe the bravest thing he’s seen since that day in the sewers where Bill pleaded with them to leave him behind. Braver than that, maybe. And if Beverly can be brave, why can’t he? What his mom is doing to him isn’t nearly as bad as what Beverly’s dad did to her. And okay, so he doesn’t have an aunt like Beverly’s to fall back on – his aunties are all his mother’s sisters, all of them cloying and unkind just like her, and he can’t think that any of them would take him into their home even if he wanted them to.

For the first time in a very long time, Eddie wishes his dad was still alive.

He doesn’t think about his dad very much – the man died when he was five, so it’s not like Eddie ever really knew him. It’s less that he lost his dad and more that he just… doesn’t have one. Every now and then, though, he finds himself wondering what his life might have been like if he hadn’t been the sole object of his mother’s fierce affection. What it might have been like to have a father to ruffle his hair and teach him to ride his bike (instead it had fallen to Bill, Stan and Richie, his mother point blank refusing to allow it, and their collective teaching style left something to be desired). How different would he be?

Eddie wants to be that boy. He doesn’t want to wilt in his mother’s overwhelming shadow. He wants to be bold like Beverly. He wants to live his goddamn life.

Eddie swallows, mouth dry, and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. He pads across the room on silent feet, careful in the darkness. Glancing over his shoulder, he sees that Beverly is still asleep, so he grabs a pen and scrap of paper from her desk and scribbles her a quick note before he loses his nerve. It’s dark enough that he can barely see what he’s writing, but it’ll have to do. On his way out, he grabs the polaroid camera, feeling a brief twinge of guilt, but he’s just borrowing it, and he’ll get Beverly some more film for it somehow.

With one final look over his shoulder, Eddie creeps out of the bedroom, down the hallway and out into the cool night air.

It’s time to be brave.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO. This chapter is a little bit... soap opera, but I hope y'all trust me. I break stuff but I'll fix it real good.
> 
> And because I haven't said it yet, here it goes: there will be NO major character deaths in this fic. There's a warning you wanna see at the start of a chapter, right?
> 
> As always, thank you so so so much for your wonderful responses to this fic! I'm so overwhelmed by all of the comments you guys leave for me, each and every one of them makes me so happy :)

“Beverly!”

Bev stirs at the shout, squints her eyes open against the sharp early morning sunlight that lands right across her face. That’s probably the only thing she doesn’t like about her new room; she never gets a lie-in, not when the sun rises directly through her window.

“Beverly, honey, your friend is on the phone!”

Friend.

Eddie.

Beverly rockets upright, abruptly wide awake as she realises that she is the only one in the room. Where’s Eddie? She scrambles out of bed and down the hallway into the kitchen, where Aunt Jenny is holding out the phone for her in one hand, the other hand cupped around a steaming mug of coffee. Beverly whips her head around to check the whole kitchen, as though he might be hiding behind the breadbin, but there’s no sign of Eddie. Did he leave already? She takes the phone from her aunt without even really thinking about it.

“Hello?”

“Beverly! Is Eddie there?” It’s Richie. His voice is kind of high and panicky and Bev’s heartrate picks up at the sound of it.

“No,” says Beverly. “I think he left already, I woke up and he was gone.”

Richie sighs. It comes down the line harsh and staticky. “_Shit._ He must have gone home. Fuck!”

“It’s early, Richie,” says Beverly, determinedly keeping the quiver from her voice. For all Richie knows, Eddie could have still been asleep. “Why were you calling?”

Another sigh. “He left me something,” says Richie. “A letter.”

Oh God. This cannot bode well. Beverly twists the curly phone cord round and round her finger, releases it with a ping, twists it round and round again. “A letter?”

“Yeah, a fucking letter! I think he’s gonna do something stupid,” says Richie, and she can hear him moving around, footsteps heavy. Something falls with a dull thud. His voice is muffled like he’s pulling a shirt over his head when he says, “I’m going over there.”

“Richie, wait!” Beverly shouts. Aunt Jenny’s head snaps up from where she’s moved to the table, poring over the newspaper, and she looks at Beverly in concern. Beverly does her best to look like a girl who has the situation under control, shooting her aunt a tight smile and turning her back. “Stupid how?” she hisses.

“I don’t fucking know!” Richie is working himself up into a panic. Beverly recognises the signs, and isn’t it crazy how she knows what her friends sound like scared before she knows any other emotion? “I need to get over there.” Click. The line goes dead, and Beverly stares down at the phone, feeling tears well in her eyes against her will.

_Shit. Shit shit shit._

“Everything okay, honey?” Aunt Jenny says. Beverly steels herself before she turns to face her, wills the tears back into her tear ducts.

“Everything’s fine, auntie,” she says. “Richie’s just worried about this stupid English assignment. I’m gonna go over and help him out with it.”

Aunt Jenny sips her coffee and gives her a long look. “All right,” she says. “Be safe, okay?” Since everything with her dad, her auntie doesn’t like for her to feel restricted and so Beverly is allowed a longer leash than is perhaps wise for any thirteen-year-old girl. It still feels foreign to her – if she’d told her dad she was going over to a boy’s house to help with his homework he would have… well. She doesn’t like thinking about what he would have done.

She puts the phone down and heads back down the hallway, mind racing. Why would Eddie leave so early? How did she not wake up? Beverly has always been a light sleeper, a by-product of one extremely unsafe childhood, so Eddie must have moved like a fucking ghost to get out without her noticing. She’s halfway through getting dressed when she spots the note, a scrap of paper on the desk pinned beneath her cup of pencils.

She drops her sweater to the floor and picks up the note with shaky hands. She reads it once, twice, three times.

_Bev,_

_Thanks for telling me about your dad. I know what I need to do now._

_Love Eddie_

That’s it. _I know what I need to do_, Beverly thinks, and suddenly she’s so cold that no number of sweaters will warm her up again. “What are you doing, Eddie?” she whispers, as though Eddie is simply hiding under the bed sheets, ready to jump out and reassure her. Why didn’t he let her go with him? She shakes her head, slips the note into her pocket and hurries to get ready. Maybe he wanted to do whatever he’s planning on doing alone, but that’s not going to happen. Not while Beverly has a say.

She thinks briefly about calling Bill, having him put the word out to the others, but she doesn’t want Aunt Jenny to get suspicious, and a panicked phone call to Bill will not go unnoticed. Until they work out what’s happening, it’s just her and Richie.

Beverly slides her sweater over her head, slips her feet into her shoes and hurries out of the door, the crisp early autumn air sobering her further still. She’s on her bike and cycling before she really even thinks about it, but Richie’s house is closer to Eddie’s than hers by a good ten minutes. Ten minutes is ten minutes too long when it comes to Richie. That’s a lot of time for him to do something stupid.

Beverly huffs out a breath and pedals faster.

* * *

Fucking _shit._

Panting from the exertion of biking the five minutes from his house to Eddie's in less than two, Richie throws his bike to the ground and sprints round the side of the house, where the tree that reaches up to Eddie’s window grows. He jumps to grab the first bough and scrambles up, scuffing his knuckles against the rough bark, twigs slapping at his face.

Mrs K’s car isn’t outside. That could be very good or very, very bad. Richie doesn’t let himself think about the very, very bad option as he edges his way along the branch closest to Eddie’s window, a path he’s taken a hundred times before but never with his heart pounding as loudly as it is right now.

Eddie’s window is always cracked open, just a little, even though Mrs K is insistent that Eddie will catch a chill from it. He leaves it open for Richie, every night without fail, just in case Richie feels like climbing through to bug him about something or other. Heart in his throat, Richie leans over and pulls the window open the rest of the way, clambers through the window. It’s getting harder to fold his increasingly long legs through the frame these days, but he can still make it.

The room is empty and silent. Richie stands there with only the rushing of his own blood to fill the hush and looks around. He’s been in Eddie’s room almost as much as he’s been in his own, hours spent here reading comics and pretending to do homework and deciding which of the other losers they would punch if they really had to (Bill and Bill, respectively), but he’s never been here alone.

His bed looks like he’s slept in it, but how do you even tell? Eddie’s been feeling pretty terrible lately; maybe he was too busy puking his guts up to make his bed the day before. Richie moves through the room slowly, suddenly nervous to disturb anything. He has the eerie sensation that he’s walking through a crime scene, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling.

There’s a stack of polaroids on the desk, and next to them is a tiny plastic tube, no bigger than Richie’s pinky finger, filled with a fine white powder. Richie picks the photos up and flicks through them, feeling the bile rise in his throat.

The first one is a bottle. It’s pretty innocuous at a glance, a little white bottle with no label and one of those child-safe lids that Eddie must be a pro at opening by now. Richie turns the photo over to confirm his suspicions and there, in his precise handwriting, Eddie has written_ the poison. _Richie swallows and moves to the next photo. The bottle is in this one too, but it’s on its side and next to it is a little heap of white powder, the same stuff that’s in the tube right here. There’s a whole series of photos. Eddie has been thorough – there’s a photo of his hand holding the powder over a glass of water, about to tip it in. In the next photo the hand is gone, and the water is still perfectly clear. On the back of this photo Eddie has written _colourless, odourless, tasteless._

Tasteless. Richie drops the photos onto the desk. He needs to find Eddie right fucking now.

He goes flying down the stairs, no longer caring if Mrs K is home to hear him. Let her. He’ll kick her ass.

But he doesn’t get the chance, because downstairs is just as silent as upstairs. The lights are all off and Richie releases a sigh, only now realising how he’d been holding his breath as he crept through the house. “Where the fuck are you, Eddie?” he mutters.

He checks the living room first, but the room is just as dark and musty and cluttered as it always is. Alarm bells go off in Richie’s head, though, when he realises something. The TV is off. Mrs K _never _turns it off, even when she’s not home – some shit about burglars, he thinks. If she’s turned it off now, maybe she doesn’t plan on coming home for a long time.

Anxiety skyrocketing ever higher, he makes his way into the kitchen, and his heart plummets to the pit of his stomach. In the middle of the room, lying on the scuffed linoleum is a shattered plate and a few pancakes. They’re coated in syrup, tiny specks of lint stuck to them now, but otherwise they’re untouched.

Worse than that, though, is the flash of red that catches Richie’s eye – a smear of blood on the edge of the counter. Richie’s legs shake as he walks further into the room. Fragments of porcelain grind underfoot. He doesn’t dare touch the blood, but he stands at the counter and _stares,_ throat tight with panic.

Is this Eddie’s blood? Where is he? Is he hurt? What the fuck happened here? Richie breathes deeply through his nose. There’s no time for this. He can freak out later, after they’ve found Eddie and made sure he’s okay. Which he is. He has to be.

The chime of the doorbell startles him so badly that he cries out and nearly sends the heap of remaining plates on the counter flying to the ground. His heart is trying to slam its way through his ribcage as he stands, frozen. Who would be- the bell rings again, and again, whoever is at the door obviously frantic. Richie goes back down the hallway and opens the front door to Beverly’s frightened face.

“Beverly?” He stands aside as Beverly pushes her way into the house.

“What’s going on, Richie?” asks Beverly. “Did you find Eddie? Is he okay?”

Richie swallows, for once at a loss for words. He wants to cry and scream and hit something, but before any of that they need to find Eddie.

“Richie!”

“I don’t… I don’t know, I can’t find him, I don’t know, I think his mom did something to him, there’s nobody here and the fucking kitchen…”

“What’s in the kitchen?” asks Beverly sharply. Richie leads her back down the hallway and gestures wordlessly to the mess on the floor.

Beverly treads carefully through the damage and Richie can mark the exact second she notices the blood by her sharp inhalation. “Is that-”

“I think it’s Eddie’s,” says Richie, putting words to the fear that’s been clawing its way up his throat since he first saw the blood.

“Shit,” breathes Beverly. “Do you think he confronted his mom? About everything?”

Richie thinks back to the polaroids on Eddie’s desk, to the letter he’d found on his welcome mat this morning. “Yeah,” he says. “Holy shit, he must have. Oh my God!” His voice cracks on that last part, high and embarrassing. “What the fuck are we gonna do? Do we call the fucking cops?”

Beverly’s eyes are shiny with tears. “I’m going to call the others,” she says. “Maybe- maybe Eddie just went over to one of their houses.”

“Why the fuck would he do that?” Richie runs a hand through his hair. He grabs a fistful and tugs sharply, the pain enough to keep him present and focused.

“I don’t know,” says Beverly. “But we need to make sure! And maybe Bill will know what to do. Or one of the others.”

Richie sighs. “Fuck it, okay, you call the others. I’ll be right back.” He sees Beverly pick up the phone and start to dial as he turns his back and sprints upstairs to Eddie’s room. The others need to see the photos.

He doesn’t go back downstairs right away. Instead, he shuts the door behind him and sinks down onto Eddie’s rumpled bed. Blowing out a shaky breath, he reaches into his pocket and pulls down the letter that Eddie left him. He’s read it three times already, but he unfolds it, smooths out the creases and reads it again.

_Richie,_

_Bev and I talked, and she made me realise some things. I guess you kind of helped too, Trashmouth. I have a plan now, and I don’t know if it’s going to work but I need to try. My mom’s been fucking with me my entire life and I just keep letting her and I don’t want to do that anymore. I can’t keep living like this.  
_

_I guess I just wanted to say thanks. I don’t know what my mom’s going to do – _here Eddie has written something and then scribbled it out so fiercely that he’s nearly pierced through the paper – _but I’ll probably see you soon anyway and you can make fun of me for not saying any of this in person. I don’t know. It’s just scary, I guess. I’m trying to be brave. Maybe I just wrote this letter to psych myself up to do this._

_I’m going home now. Thanks for everything. _Another harsh scribble, so thick that the words underneath are completely obliterated.

_Love Eddie_

_PS – if you don’t hear from me for a few days it would be awesome if you could check and see if my mom killed me. _Eddie’s drawn a little gravestone here, _R.I.P Eddie_ inked in his neat writing. It would be a lot funnier if his blood wasn’t coating the counter downstairs.

Richie feels tears prickling at the back of his eyes, and he blinks to chase them away as he puts the letter back in his pocket. It’s not a goodbye. No matter what it feels like, it’s not a goodbye. It’s the vaguest, most cryptic bullshit Richie has ever read, and he’s so gonna kick Eddie’s ass for freaking him out like this, but that’s all it is.

He sits there for fuck knows how long, breathing. It’s not until he hears the front door being flung open, the chatter of voices drifting up the stairs that he jumps to his feet. He scoops up the photos and the little tube of powder from the desk and hurries back downstairs.

Bill and Stan are already in the kitchen with Beverly, the both of them pale faced as they look down at the mess. “The others are on their way,” Beverly says.

Richie strides into the room and pointedly turns his back on the shattered plate and the blood-that-is-not-necessarily-Eddie’s, throwing the photos down on the table. “Take a look at this shit,” he says in lieu of a greeting. The others huddle around the table, shoulder to shoulder, and look through the polaroids of the fucking poison that Eddie has so scientifically documented.

Richie is so focused on the photographs, picturing Eddie sneaking around his own home in the dead of night looking for the poison his own mother is feeding him, imagining him experimenting with it, drinking the fucking water he dissolved that shit in, that he couldn’t say when the others arrived. He couldn’t say whether they let themselves in or if Beverly answered the door, couldn’t say even how they reacted to the destruction in the kitchen, but somehow they all end up crowded around the kitchen table looking at Eddie’s photographs.

Stan is the first to break the silence. “It’s evidence,” he says. “He was collecting evidence.”

“D-d-did he say something to you guys?” Bill asks, looking between them all, eyes hard. Richie thinks about the letter that’s burning a hole in his pocket, but it’s not something he wants to share. Eddie wrote that for _him. _

Luckily, Beverly speaks up. “He wrote me a note,” she says. “He just said... he knew what he had to do now.”

Richie feels the panic rising in his chest again. “That little fucker! He’s so goddamn cryptic, I’m gonna kill him.”

Stan glares at him. “His mom might have already done that, Richie!”

“Shut the fuck up, Stan!” screams Richie, the words bursting out of him before he can even think about them. There’s a solid three seconds in which all he sees is red and his fists are clenched and itching to smash Stanley’s stupid scared face in. “He’s not fucking _dead,_ Jesus.”

“How do you know that? That’s his blood on the counter, isn’t it?” Stan's voice is rising too, shrill and angry just like when he thought they'd abandoned him in the sewers.

Bill fists a hand in Richie’s shirt, perhaps sensing that Richie is about to go completely apeshit. “We need to c-c-call the c-cops,” he says. “And we n-n-need to look for Eddie. Maybe he got away. Or m-m-maybe his mom took him to the hospital, and that’s why her car is gone.”

Richie runs his hands through his hair. “I can’t stay here,” he says to Bill. “I need to look for him. We need to make sure he’s okay.”

“He will be, Richie,” says Beverly, and she’s so firm that for a minute he almost believes her even though she’s just as much of a dumbass kid as he is.

They don’t all need to be there to talk to the cops – in fact, it’s probably better that they’re not. Richie’s out because if he stays in this house another second he will lose his shit. Mike’s out because they want the cops to actually solve this crime and not to sit around being racist fuckwits to their friend.

In the end, they settle on Bill and Beverly staying to talk to the cops – Bill because he’s dealt with them before, when Georgie went missing (this is going to end differently Eddie is going to be _fine_) and Beverly because she’s easily up there as the most charming of the losers. Richie heard all about how she tricked Mr Keene at the pharmacy so the guys could steal supplies. If anyone can make the cops in this asshole town give a fuck, it’s Beverly.

So they leave Bev and Bill to handle the cops, and the rest of them scatter to play Nancy fucking Drew. “I’ll check the quarry,” says Richie. “Ben, you try the hospital. Mike, the barrens.”

“I’ll check the clubhouse,” says Stan, which is exactly what Richie had been about to say. They smile tightly at each other. Mike and Ben are off already and Richie has one leg over his bike when Stan speaks up again. “He’s not dead, Richie.”

Richie recognises this for the apology it is. “I know,” he says, and then he’s away, flying down the street faster than he’s ever cycled before.

Eddie is not fucking dead.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello hello hello >:)
> 
> I'm a little concerned about this chapter, honestly, because not a lot really happens. But I think it's necessary, and I hope you guys will like it.
> 
> The response to last chapter killed me off tbh jklsdlkj y'all really love Eddie Kaspbrak, huh? Relatable. I swear I'll let him be happy eventually! As always thank you so much for all of the kudos and comments, they always make me so happy to read and really brighten my day! I love validation 0:)

It’s hot.

That’s the first thing he registers. Before the rumbling noise and the way the ground shifts beneath him and the bone deep aching of his body, he’s just so fucking hot. He’s burning up, he’s on fire but on the inside, his organs so hot that they bubble and crisp and melt into goo. His eyes are going to turn to liquid too, melt right out of his skull if he doesn’t keep his eyelids shut, and yet he’s absolutely drenched. How is it possible to be soaking wet and still be on fire? How is it possible to be this hot and still be _alive_?

He whimpers and tries to shift his body. There must be a breeze somewhere, a gasp of cooler air to calm the flames just a little, but when he tries to move, he only sticks to the ground. His skin must have melted and melded to the floor, like the fat melting from a pork belly as it slowly roasts in the oven. Is _he _in an oven? There’s no way anywhere else could be this fucking hot, is there? Somebody has to be cooking him. Maybe it’s Pennywise, back for more but sick of eating children raw. Maybe he’ll use a knife and fork this time, too.

There’s liquid running down his face and he cries out – his eyes! He screws his eyelids more tightly shut, desperate to keep his eyeballs in his skull where they belong, but no matter what he does he can still feel them rolling down his cheeks. Somebody sobs and it’s only when the pain in his throat registers that he realises that somebody was him.

“Eddie-bear? Are you awake?”

The voice comes to him as though from underwater, muffled and warped. It’s familiar, a warm hug that’s just a fraction too tight, too cloying. He’s never not responded to the owner of that voice, and he tries to speak now, but the words evaporate from his tongue and all that comes out is an incoherent “Hnnngh.”

“Open your eyes, Eddie-bear,” says the voice, and Eddie shakes his head even though it makes firecrackers explode inside his brain. No. No, he can’t, it’s too fucking hot, what’s left of his eyes will melt out of his skull and down his face, burning deep rivets into the already scalding skin. “Eddie.” Sharper this time, like a knife that cuts him somewhere deep he didn’t even know existed, and he can’t ignore the order.

He opens his eyes and cries out. It’s blinding – harsh white light sears his retinas and he shuts his eyes again on instinct. When he tries again, he cracks them open a little at a time, lets himself adjust. The world is still too bright, but it’s not pure white this time and it feels a little less like he’s being stabbed in the eyes.

Slowly, slowly, the world comes into focus. It doesn’t make sense at first – above him is pure grey and when he turns his head to one side there’s a weird brown oblong only a few feet away from his face. He shifts his head to look in front of him, agony spearing through his skull with every little movement, and becomes aware that the world is moving. Light spills in through a window where trees and telephone poles are zipping past.

Oh. He’s in the car. _Duh._

“How are you doing back there, Eddie-bear?”

Wait. What the fuck is he doing in the car? Eddie squints in the general direction of the driver’s seat, now recognising the strange brown shapes in front of him for the seats that they are. The light coming through the windscreen is bright enough that his mother’s shape is blurry and soft by comparison, but when she turns to glance at him her face is as clear as it’s ever been.

Focus. What is he doing in the car? Eddie tries to grasp at the thought, to follow it back to the start like Theseus escaping the labyrinth, but his thoughts are all like steam, slipping through his fingers and scalding his skin when he tries to grab a hold of them.

“Wh’r…” Eddie tries to speak again. His mouth is drier than that desert… the Mohawk? The Motown. Fuck. It’s not _important_, but he can’t seem to keep his thoughts from scattering like a flock of startled birds. “Wh’r we goin’?”

“Oh, Eddie.” His mother’s voice is soft, but the sound of it makes a hard ball of dread form in the pit of his stomach. Eddie just can’t – he doesn’t know _why_, and he feels more tears slipping down his face. Not his eyeballs, he now realises. Small mercies. “You’re very sick, sweetheart. We’re going somewhere safe, where you can rest in peace.”

That’s wrong. Not the sick part – he’s never felt this bad in his fucking life, is genuinely concerned he might be dying – but the safe part. He doesn’t feel safe. But he is, isn’t he? This is his mother. She’s always taken care of him, especially when he’s sick. She’d never let anything happen to him.

“Rest, Eddie,” says his mother. “We’ve got a way to go yet.”

There’s something niggling at the back of Eddie’s mind, a pervasive wrongness that he can’t shake, but he’s just so tired, and he hurts so much and so he lets his eyes slip shut and feels himself drift away.

* * *

When he wakes again, the flames have died down enough that his brain is filled with more than just smoke. This time, he knows where he is straight away, and when he tries to sit up, he manages to peel his sweaty skin from the leather seats with minimal issue. He’s quiet, sliding up so his back is pressed against the car door, his legs stretched across the seats.

He’s not wearing a seatbelt. His mom always makes him wear his seatbelt, even when they’re just going down the block. He supposes it’s not so easy to put a seatbelt on somebody when they’re lying across the back seats, dying, but it still feels odd.

Eddie swallows. His mouth is dry, his tongue thick and heavy in his mouth. He feels better than he did earlier, but he’s still slow and stupid, can’t quite put the pieces together right. How did he get here? His mom must have brought him to the car, right? But where are they going? _Why _are they going?

_Somewhere safe, sweetheart, _he hears, like a dream. The memories are patchy and faint but he knows he woke up once already in the car, remembers feeling so fucking hot he could die of it. How long ago was that? He stretches his mind back and tries to _think. _What happened? Why does he feel so fucking sick?

And he does. His head is like a lead weight, chin dropping to his chest. He tries to lean it back against the window behind him, but the vibrations of the car make his teeth rattle and the agony in his head spike to an all-time high. The motion makes him aware of the nausea that churns in his stomach and he feels the exhausting, inexplicable urge to cry. The only reason he doesn’t is that he’s too dehydrated. He feels shrivelled and wrung out and he longs for a glass of water, of juice, of fucking greywater to quench his thirst.

“Eddie?”

His mother’s voice comes as a vague surprise. Eddie turns his head towards her. “Mmm?” he says, which is all he can manage. He hopes it encompasses everything he wants to ask – _where are we going _and _why are we going there _and _what’s wrong with me _and _mommy, please_ – but his mom just purses her lips at him.

“We’re nearly there now, Eddie-bear,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

That sounds nice. Eddie wants to drift away somewhere soft and warm and safe and not think or care about anything, to just float away, _we all float down here_, but no. That’s wrong, isn’t it? He clears his throat, tries to push himself further upright. His muscles feel like jelly so that’s kind of a lost cause, but he at least needs to speak. “Ma,” he croaks. “What’s happening?” His voice sounds like he’s been gargling sand. He’d kill a man for something to drink.

His mom tuts at him. “You’re sick, sweetheart,” she says, and she looks away, back to the road. For some reason this leaves Eddie feeling both relieved and bereft, and he has to fight off tears once more. He hates being sick. “Don’t you remember?”

“Nuh,” he says. “Where we are going?”

“To Auntie Maura’s.” She still isn’t looking at him. Eddie’s too tired and feels too much like he’s been run over by a garbage truck to make sense of her tone.

“In… in Houlton?” Eddie squints. Somewhere in the fog of his mind, he remembers Auntie Maura’s. They go there for the holidays, sometimes. It’s a little under two hours’ drive to get there, although Eddie feels as though they’ve been on the road forever. Maura is his mom’s older sister, every bit as smothering and neurotic as she is, and she has a little townhouse that in Eddie’s memories is just as dark and miserable as his own home. “Why?”

His mom sniffs. “That town isn’t good for you, Eddie-bear,” she says. “We need a change of scenery. Somewhere for you to recuperate _properly_, without those _friends_ of yours coming along and riling you up.”

“My friends?” Eddie tries to think past the throbbing in his head. There’s something important about his friends that he needs to remember, but as he tries to catch the thought, the car slows and he realises they’ve arrived. Whatever he needs to remember slips through his fingers.

His mother helps him out of the car, and the outside air hits him in an icy blast that makes him shudder, teeth chattering. His mother’s hands burn his shoulders like a brand but he has to lean on her, legs trembling so badly he fears he’ll crumple to the sidewalk if she lets him go.

Auntie Maura is standing on her doorstep, arms folded, frowning at them. Her hair is darker than his mom’s, half-tumbling from her curlers, and she’s wrapped in a worn pale pink bathrobe that strains against her bulk. Swollen ankles peek from the top of scuffed up slippers. She hasn’t left the house all day (however long that’s been). She rarely does.

“Oh, Sonia!” she cries as Eddie and his mother make their way up the front walk. She wrings her hands, standing aside to allow them to squeeze past her down the hallway. Eddie feels dizzy and half-present. The hallway swirls in front of him as they walk and stepping into the warmth of Auntie Maura’s house after the chill of the outside makes a fresh wave of nausea crash over him. He’s grateful when his mom lowers him to the sofa in Auntie Maura’s living room.

He zones out for a while, he thinks, because when he comes back to himself he’s bundled in no fewer than three blankets and there’s a bowl of soup on the coffee table in front of him, a glass of water settled next to it.

There’s no coaster. That’s going to leave a water ring.

Eddie frowns and tries to focus. He can hear his mother and aunt speaking in hushed voices somewhere else in the house, too faint to make out the words. It’s more like the buzzing of a persistent housefly than a conversation.

Shuddering, he leans forward to examine the soup.

There’s something about the soup. He knows this. He… shouldn’t eat the soup? With one trembling hand he reaches out to grab the spoon that’s been left for him and dredges it through the soup. Does he have the stomach flu again? An unsettling sense of dread clings to the edges of his consciousness. He stirs again, making fresh plumes of steam rise from the bowl, and puts the spoon down. He shouldn't eat this.

He’s still thirsty, though, his mouth so dry he thinks he’ll never produce another drop of saliva, so he reaches for the glass of water. It’s halfway to his mouth, hands still shaking so badly he fears he might drop the glass, when it hits him.

He did something with the water. Eddie closes his eyes and forces himself to think, to ignore his pain and discomfort and fever and just remember. There’s something here that’s so, so wrong, and he needs to remember before it’s too late to do anything.

Abruptly, the memories of the previous night come rushing back to him with such force that a breath is punched from his lungs.

He found it.

He found the fucking poison. He found it, creeping around his mother’s house in the dead of night, and he took photos and he tested it and he mixed it with water and watched it dissolve into nothing, no taste, no smell, no flavour. The water had been lukewarm by that point, and he’d put it to his lips and sipped and braced himself for _something_, half-expecting to drop dead right there on the spot, but he hadn’t.

He feels like he might now. He puts the glass back down hard, water sloshing over the top and landing on the table, on his fingers, and his breath catches in his throat because it’s in this, too, he’s sure. Frantic now, he wipes his fingers on one of the blankets, the fabric scratching at his skin which feels hypersensitive but he has to get it _off_. His chest is tight and the air in this dark, miserable house is so thin that every reedy, wheezy breath he takes seems to bring him no oxygen. Without even thinking about it, he reaches for his inhaler but it’s not here, he doesn’t carry it anymore because it’s not real, none of it was real but this is real, he’s going to die alone right here on this sofa gasping for air.

Richie has his inhaler.

The thought strikes him out of nowhere, just meaningless words floating in the fog of his hysteria, but something about it catches him. He remembers. He remembers being crammed into a janitor’s closet, the smell of disinfectant sharp in his nostrils, remembers the warmth of Richie’s hand on his neck, calming him more easily than the inhaler ever did. Eddie longs for that day again with the fierceness of a small child. Somehow, just the memory is enough to ease him back from the brink.

Eddie sits and shudders, his own pulse loud and harsh in his ears. It makes the lump on his head throb. He raises a hand to brush his fingers over the injury, feather-light, and wonders how he didn’t notice it before now. How did it happen?

This train of thought is derailed before it ever really gets going when Eddie hears footsteps thumping down the stairs.

His mother. It’s like he’s been doused in cold water, and he freezes. What does he do? She’s going to make him eat this. She’s going to keep him sick forever. Panic singing in his chest, Eddie throws himself sideways and shuts his eyes just as he hears the door swing open. His heart is pounding but he doesn’t dare move, forces himself to take deep, even breathes. The seam of the sofa cushions presses uncomfortably against his face.

“Oh, Eddie-bear.” His mother’s voice is filled with such tenderness that it makes him ache. _I’m right here! _he wants to scream. _Why can’t that be enough? _He wants to sit up and fold himself into her embrace, for her to make him small and safe like she did when he was a little kid, but he can’t. She can’t. There’s no fixing this. He knows that now. He tried, and now he’s trapped in a house that is not his own with a mother who doesn’t want anything good for him.

“Let him rest, Sonia,” he hears Auntie Maura say.

“But he hasn’t eaten his soup!” His mom’s voice takes on that desperate, whiney quality that grates on Eddie so much, the one that makes her seem like an overgrown baby, like it’s his job to watch her and nurture her and stay by her side. There’s a wobble to her tone when she says, “He needs his strength.”

“He can eat it when he wakes up,” says Auntie Maura.

He doesn’t need to open his eyes to know that Ma is pouting. He can picture her bloated face, eyes wide and wet, lip quivering, the threat of tears, _don’t you love me, Eddie-bear,_ the face that makes him feel so awful and angry and stuck. “All right,” she says at last. “I’m just so worried about him.” It takes everything Eddie has not to flinch when he feels a hand brush against his cheek, and the blankets are tucked more tightly against him. It’s sweltering.

“I know, Sonia.”

“He’s always been delicate,” his mom says. “He stopped taking his medicine, you know?”

Auntie Maura gasps. Eddie clenches his jaw so he won’t scream. _It wasn’t fucking real! None of it was! _“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know,” says his mom, like she doesn’t know that every pill she ever gave him was a fake, like she doesn’t know that Eddie knows it too. It’s like a sick game they play, these days. _I know something you don’t know _– except they do. Eddie knows, now, every fucked up thing his mom has ever done to him. “I think it has something to do with those friends of his. They’re all awful, especially that Tozier boy and that filthy little Marsh girl. They made him stop taking his pills, I’m sure! That’s why we had to get away, Mo. I had to take him somewhere safe.”

Auntie Maura is resolute when she says, “You can stay here as long as you need. We’ll remind Eddie what’s important, don’t you worry.”

Eddie lies still and breathes and thinks about the bowl of soup sitting two feet away from him, watching him. He knows well enough what’s important, and it’s not this. It’s his friends. The only ones who ever tried to protect him, who ever actually tried to keep him safe. He needs to get back to them.

In his mind he pictures their faces, Bill fierce and resolute; Stan rolling his eyes, trying to keep stoic when they all know he never can; Ben earnest and kind, so fucking kind you could drown in it; Mike with the sweetest smile any kid has ever had, Mike who pushed a fucking bully down a well; Beverly with her sharp wit that’s at odds with the way she makes him feel safer than he has in a long time.

And Richie. Eddie can see his eyes, bug-like, magnified behind those stupid milk-bottle lenses, staring at him with a million different emotions, only half of which Eddie has ever been able to figure out. Richie who never treats him like he’s fragile, always the first to tackle him when he makes a stupid joke at Richie’s expense, the one who’ll make a thousand jokes at _Eddie’s _expense because he knows Eddie will always, always rise to the challenge. Eddie imagines he’s lying in the hammock in the clubhouse – Richie a soft weight at his side, their legs tangled together skin on skin – not lying here alone on his aunt’s sofa, feigning sleep so his mother won’t pour any more poison down his throat.

He falls asleep for real picturing his friends’ faces, and his last conscious thought is a promise to himself.

Whatever it takes, he’s going home.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GOD it's been so LONG. Sorry guys! I hope this chapter doesn't disappoint <3 Thank you all for your amazing comments and kudos, I swear I'll get around to answering them but I wanted to get this out before Gab and Soph murdered me, so. Here it is!

Richie spends over an hour scouring the quarry and the surrounding woods before he finally admits to himself that Eddie isn’t here.

His throat is hoarse from shouting Eddie’s name – and if it’s a little bit from crying, too, well, he’s the only one who’ll ever know. Richie lets out a scream and turns to kick the closest tree. Sharp pain shoots up through his toes and nothing is fixed and he doesn’t feel any better but he kicks it again anyway. “Fuck,” he mutters, then. “Where the hell are you, Eddie?” There’s only silence to greet him, and he climbs back up to the top of the quarry where he left his bike, breathless and Eddie-less.

He takes it back to Eddie’s house, hoping, praying that one of the others has found Eddie safe and sound. He can’t wait to yell at that little shit. Nobody scares him like this and gets away with it.

When he gets there, there’s no cars outside – not Mrs K’s, and not the cops’ either. The rest of the losers’ bikes are lying on the grass out front. Richie is the last to return, and he climbs the steps to the house and thinks _please, please, please._

Everyone looks up as Richie enters the kitchen. He does a headcount, one two three four five other losers slumped around the table, against the counters, and his stomach lurches. He didn’t expect Eddie to be here, not really, but the disappointment still burns thick and bitter on his tongue.

Bill is shaking. He’s standing by the table where Beverly sits and stares ahead with her thousand-yard stare that makes Richie think _deadlights_, and he’s shaking like he’s about to come apart, his fists clenched tight, white-knuckled.

“I’m guessing no one found Eddie, then,” says Richie into the silence.

Bill shakes some more, his lips forming countless aborted syllables before he finally spits out, “They w-w-w-wouldn’t _fucking _listen to us.”

“What do you mean?” Richie demands, his stomach performing another somersault.

Bill looks so frustrated that for a moment Richie thinks he’ll start screaming right there in the Kaspbraks’ kitchen. Beverly chooses this moment to step in, pale-faced, shiny-eyed but resolute. “The cops. They took the photos,” she says. “And the- the poison. They said they’d look into it, but they didn’t…”

“They didn’t b-b-believe us,” says Bill. “About Eddie’s m-m-mom.”

“They thought Eddie was doing _drugs, _and that’s what the poison was,” says Beverly, incredulous.

Anyone who’s spoken to Eddie Kaspbrak for more than five minutes forms one of two impressions: the first is that the kid is such a fucking hypochondriac that he’d never so much as touch a joint for fear of killing all his fucking braincells, let alone take anything harder than weed.

The second is that he’s such a hyperactive gremlin that it’s entirely possible that he’s been on drugs the entire goddamn time.

The cops, having never spoken to Eddie for any significant length of time, are far more likely to assume the first, based purely on Mrs Kaspbrak’s reputation for being the most overbearing mother in the whole of the contiguous United States, so this assumption comes as a surprise. And, okay, the police in Derry have never shown any aptitude for actually solving crimes, but Richie thinks they can be forgiven this, given that the latest spate of child-murdering was actually being done by an evil shapeshifting clown. What he wasn’t expecting was for them to be so useless in the face of actual, human evil, right in front of their faces. Hell, Eddie practically gift-wrapped the evidence for them. What the fuck else do they want?

“There’s a new police chief, right?” says Ben. “After Bowers’ dad… you know.”

Bill nods, jaw clenched. “_Fucking_ useless,” he says. The words punch themselves out of him and the cursing seems to help with the stutter, but not with his anger. “They d-d-didn’t even care about the blood. Said Eddie had probably _tripped,_ and they were at the emergency r-room or something.”

“I wonder if they even checked,” says Stan, and Ben shakes his head.

“I went there,” says Ben. “The nurses wouldn’t tell me anything, but I couldn’t find Mrs K’s car outside, so I don’t think Eddie was there,” he says, probably for Richie’s benefit, since Richie knows he missed the others’ recapping of their search for Eddie, too busy screaming his lungs out in the quarry. Richie nods. “But I hung around in the waiting room and the cops never showed.”

“They can’t just do _nothing_, though!” says Stan. “They’re the _cops. _Eddie could be seriously hurt. They have to do something.”

Ben chews on his lip. He’s sitting at the table too, and he looks down at his hands, clasped in front of him, half a prayer. “Have you guys ever noticed anything… weird about the adults in Derry?” he says.

Richie wants to scream. How is this shit gonna help them find Eddie? They can talk about how fucking weird grown-ups are later.

“W-weird how?” says Bill, and Richie slumps against the counter next to Stanley and tries not to vibrate out of his skin. Ben has Bill on the hook, and that means they’re having this conversation whether Richie likes it or not. Stan nudges their shoulders together, a comforting presence at his side, but he’s not Eddie. Richie nudges back anyway.

“I don’t know,” says Ben. He doesn’t look up, seeming to sense that all eyes are on him. “It’s like… they just don’t care. About anything.”

Richie has countless lectures from his father on the importance of flossing to disprove this point. _Do you want gingivitis, Richie? Because that’s how you get gingivitis. _

“Like the missing kids?” says Mike, and Ben nods, almost in relief.

“Right!” he says. “Kids were literally going missing every week,” and it’s kind of him not to say _being eaten by a demon clown _where Bill can hear, even though they all know the truth, “and all anyone did was put up some posters.”

“You think this is the same?” Stanley says, a quiver in his voice, and Richie’s stomach turns. He’s back in Neibolt, suddenly, a crumpled MISSING poster in his hands but this time it doesn’t say Richie Tozier, it says- no. He closes his eyes and breathes in and it’s the sterile scent of Eddie’s kitchen, not the musty air of Neibolt, and Eddie is not missing, not like those other kids.

“It’s not It,” says Beverly. “It can’t be. We killed It.”

“No,” agrees Ben. “It’s Mrs K that’s hurting Eddie, sure, but it’s just like before, the way nobody else even cares.”

“So we make them care,” says Richie. “We go down to that fucking police station and we don’t leave until they agree to actually _look _for Eddie!”

“Sounds like a great way to get arrested,” says Mike, which is fair, but Richie doesn’t want to be fair right now. He feels the blood rush to his face.

“Well, we need to do something!” he shouts. “Eddie is gone, okay, he’s gone and we don’t-“ his voice cracks, embarrassingly high and to his horror he feels tears well in his eyes, and the next thing he knows Bill has his arms around him, tight like he’s trying to hold Richie together by sheer force of will.

“He’s not gone,” says Bill. “He’s not. We’ll find him.”

“But why doesn’t anyone _care?_” Richie says, and oh, fuck, there’s still a wobble to his voice, he needs to lock this shit down, but it’s so hard and all he wants to do is scream and rage and maybe hug Eddie and make sure that fucker is still breathing, and he can’t.

No one has an answer for that. Ben and Mike are both still frowning like they’re deep in thought, and Richie clings to Bill, and Stan too when Bill fists a hand in his shirt and pulls him into their embrace, and he doesn’t fall apart today.

They go back to Bill’s together, because they can’t be apart and they can’t be here anymore and they can’t go to the clubhouse without Eddie. And like, obviously they’ve been there without him before, it’s not as if the seven of them are attached at the hip like some kind of Siamese septuplet, but there’s a difference between Eddie not being there and Eddie not being _able_ to be there. So they go to Bill’s.

Richie sits in Bill’s basement, tense on the worn old sofa that Mrs Denbrough brought down here for them when they got a new one for the living room. There’s a stain on this side of the sofa that always grosses Eddie out, so that’s Richie’s side, but either side could be his right now. Richie digs his nails into his leg, sharp.

They’re getting Eddie back. Somehow.

They spend the night at Bill’s, in the end. Nobody’s ready to go home yet, not without knowing that Eddie’s okay, but they don’t know what to _do._ They spend hours trying to decide where Mrs K could have taken him but he could be _anywhere _and Richie can’t stop thinking about a shallow grave in the Barrows, about Eddie cold and still and alone.

Eddie’s _fine. _Somehow, the others fall asleep, sprawled out together on the sofa and the floor and the chairs, limbs tangled, somebody snoring quietly.

Richie doesn’t sleep at all.

* * *

When Eddie wakes up, the house is silent. He lies still and breathes, keeping the rhythm natural in case his mom is still here, still watching him, but when he cracks his eyes open there’s nobody there. Alone in the eerie silence of his aunt’s living room, he shifts upright and swallows around the ball of sand that’s lodged in his throat. He needs water.

One scratchy blanket clinging to his shoulders like a cape, Eddie shuffles to his feet and into the kitchen, where the dim glow from the oven clock breaks the darkness. It’s nearly two in the morning.

The pipes rumble deeply before the water rushes out of the faucet and Eddie almost turns it off there and then, terrified that somebody will hear him, but his thirst is too great to ignore. He sticks his head under the faucet and drinks straight from it, water pouring down his chin, and it’s lukewarm and kind of metallic but it’s still the best thing he’s ever tasted.

Thirst quenched, he suddenly becomes aware of the hundred other problems his body is screaming about – the cavernous ache of his stomach, the pounding of his head that’s part dehydration, part splitting head injury, and the way his skeleton feels like it might just shake apart at any moment.

Still, though. He’s okay. He’s alive. He takes a moment in the quiet of the kitchen to clutch at the edge of his blanket and inhales deeply. He’s alive.

Staying that way might take a little more work. Reflexive tears spring to his eyes as the enormity of the situation hits him – he’s more than a hundred miles from home and anyone who could help him, and his mom wants him dead. Or close enough.

But he blinks back the tears and swallows back the lump in his throat and breathes, breathes, breathes because he’s okay, he can do this. He needs to get back to Derry. If he can get back to his friends then everything will be fine.

Back in the living room he dares to switch on the lamp and let the yellow light spill across the chest of drawers where his aunt’s phone sits. He stares at it for a moment, heart pounding, visions of his mother tearing down the stairs _thump thump thump _and wrenching the phone from his hands as soon as he so much as touches it flashing through his mind. For a few precious seconds, he’s frozen with indecision before his hand snatches up the phone of its own accord.

He’s calling Richie, of course. It’s a no-brainer. Richie’s the only one of the losers with his own phone line; his dad makes good money as a dentist and both Mr and Mrs Tozier had gotten sick of picking up the phone only to hear Richie on the extension practicing his stupid voices to one of his friends. Getting him his own number was a win-win. All of this is to say that Richie is the only one it’s safe to call, the only one whose parents won’t pick up the phone and demand to know who’s calling at this hour.

Eddie glances up at the door of the living room, which is slightly ajar. Which is riskier, closing it and having the door hinge squeak, or leaving it open and letting his voice drift up the hallway? He nudges the door shut, praying to every god he’s ever heard of for it to shut silently. It does, and he sags with the relief of it.

It takes him a minute to remember Richie’s number, which is… strange. He’s called Richie hundreds of times, knows his phone number probably better than he knows his own. The poison is obviously clouding his mind, and he imagines the noxious miasma of it spreading, coating all of his memories until the only thing he knows how to do is be sick.

He clenches his jaw and listens to the phone ring. It won’t happen.

He doesn’t know what he expects Richie to do, honestly. Maybe nothing. He just – he needs someone to know where he is, needs somebody to know he _exists, _and not in the way his mom wants him to.

The phone rings. Eddie twists the phone cord around his fingers, nervous energy buzzing under his skin. “Come on, Richie,” he mutters. The phone keeps ringing.

Maybe he’s sleeping. Richie keeps weird hours and he’s never not answered Eddie’s calls, so Eddie hadn’t really expected anything other than a sleepy “H’lo?” – but the phone just keeps ringing, until finally there’s a click that hits Eddie right in the pit of his stomach, and Richie’s stupid voice coming down the line. “I can’t make it to the phone right now, guv’na!” The British guy on Richie’s answering machine is even worse than its current iteration. “Leave us a message at the beep and I’ll get back to you post-haste! Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!”

Eddie closes his eyes and resists the urge to slam his head against the wall, partly because of the way Richie slipped into his fucking leprechaun voice at the end there but mostly because, well.

Tears prickle at his eyes and this time he can’t keep them back. He thinks about hanging up, but even a tenuous link to his friends, to Richie is more than he’s had all day, and he clings to it like a life raft.

He sighs, hating how shaky it sounds. He doesn’t want his friends to _worry _about him, he just wants them to know… something. He doesn’t know, really, what he wants them to know. That he’s okay? That he’s still breathing?

“Hey, Rich,” he says, after seven empty seconds. “I, uh. I guess you got my letter?” It’s all come back to him by now, the nightmarish events of the past twenty-four hours, but he just doesn’t have the energy to be embarrassed about that awful, sincere letter he left on Richie’s doorstep.

“Sorry,” he says, keeping his voice low. His mom’s a heavy sleeper but he can’t shake the sense that she’s looming over his shoulder. “I know it was kind of a lot. Anyway, I did something kind of stupid.” He leans against the wall, fatigue weighing him down. He could sleep for a lifetime if he lets himself.

“I told my mom I knew. Everything she’d been doing to me. The…” his lips work silently for a moment, “the poison.” He huffs out a laugh despite himself. Nothing’s funny about this, but he can’t help it. It was just such a stupid thing to do. He’s such a fucking idiot. “She didn’t take it well.” He closes his eyes and thinks of rough hands shoving him when they’re normally soft, gentle with him like he’s a baby bird. The lump on his head throbs at the memory and his throat burns.

“Anyway, I guess you’re asleep, huh? I just had to call while I could. I don’t know when my mom will wake up.” His grip on the phone tightens. “We’re at my Auntie Maura’s. In Houlton. Don’t worry, though,” he says, and feels stupid as soon as he does, because who says Richie’s _worried?_ “I’m gonna get home somehow.” He’s silent for a moment and there’s nothing but the crackling of the answering machine to greet him. “Okay. I’m gonna go. Night, Richie.” He puts the phone down.

There goes that. A tear slips down his face before he can stop it, then another and another. Furious at himself, he swipes at his face and pushes away from the wall. He waits while the world spins in and out of focus.

He can’t call any of the others, not without risking their parents picking up. Parents just aren’t safe. Not in the way he needs them to be. He’s on his own.

This whole house makes his skin crawl, and despite the exhaustion weighing heavily on his bones all Eddie wants is to leave, to step outside and _walk_ back to Derry if he has to. Maybe he could take his mom’s car, but he doesn’t know how to drive and it’s probably best not to try for the first time while he’s recovering from a fairly severe bout of poisoning.

He staggers back over to the sofa, because he can’t think and stand at the same time yet.

They’ve been to Auntie Maura’s before, and they don’t always drive. His mom loves to get one of those all-day bus passes and drag him from town to town to visit his aunties. Eddie’s cheeks sting at the memories, and he takes a moment to be glad that he was sick enough this time for Auntie Maura to forgo pinching his cheeks and telling him how he’s grown.

Eddie runs his shaky hands through his hair, forcing himself to focus. The bus. He can get the bus back to Derry. All he needs to do is steal some money from his mom’s purse (and if he twitches at just the thought of his mom catching him, of what she might do to him – well, there’s nobody here to see) and make it to the bus station without being caught. He knows the way. If there’s one thing Eddie’s good at – and it’s starting to feel like there is only one thing these days – it’s directions. He’s got an unerring internal compass and he knows in his bones that he can find his way home. He just needs to get out of here first.

Precious minutes slip by as he creeps around, legs trembling, heart so far into his throat it’s choking him, before he finds his mom’s purse on the side table in the hallway. The clacking sound when he unclasps it seems deafening in the silence, and Eddie winces, certain that his mom and Auntie Maura are about to fly down the stairs and start screaming at him, but there’s nothing. Eddie snatches a few bills from his mom’s purse.

For the first time, he realises he’s not wearing shoes. His mom must have taken them off, and the thought of her touching him while she’s sleeping makes him shudder, but he can’t think about that now. He stumbles back to the living room, over to the sofa where he finds his shoes, and he shoves them on without touching the laces, hands still unsteady.

Urgency grips him like a vice, crushing his lungs and he _knows _it’s ridiculous, there’s no way his mom is awake in the middle of the night waiting to catch him escaping, but the panic won’t leave him.

He hasn’t got a jacket, doesn’t know if his mom brought any of his clothes with them when she fled Derry, but he can’t stop for something as trivial as that. He needs to get away. The bus station won’t be open for hours, probably, but by then it’ll be too late for him to get away.

He twists the lock and cringes again, every miniscule sound amplified as he tugs the door open. The air outside is cold, a shock to his already exhausted system. He takes a breath that makes his lungs sting and steps outside, closes the door as softly as he can.

Another deep breath. His body is aching and his head is still pounding and he’s miles away from home and he doesn’t know how long he can keep going for but he’s okay. He knows the way.

With one final glance over his shoulder, Eddie walks away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me? Ending every chapter with Eddie disappearing into the night? It's more likely than you think


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I listened to Silver Springs for two straight days and wrote this and I'm an insane person now.
> 
> ANYWAY I'm very sorry for the long wait!! I know I didn't make any promises for timescales so I'm not like, THAT sorry, but I know it sucks when fics take forever to update, so. Sorry! Time sure does get away from me but your amazing comments have been encouraging me to keep going with this! <3 Thank you all so much! I will definitely respond to all of them but I wanted to upload this first before I read it to death and decide I don't like it after all. So here it is.

The sun has been up for a couple of hours by the time Richie stumbles home alone, bleary-eyed and miserable. He slips away from the Denbroughs’ while the other Losers are still sleeping. It’s easier to sneak out of their house without being seen these days. Bill’s parents have been like ghosts ever since Georgie.

The front door creaks when Richie lets himself into the house. It’s a point of fond contention between his parents. “When are you going to put some oil on those hinges, Went,” his mom will say, and his dad will come back with something along the lines of, “How else are we going to hear burglars, Maggie? You want the house to get robbed, is that it?” and then he’s away, sighing about how she wants thieves and ruffians to steal their only son away in the night all in the name of having a door that opens squeaklessly until Maggie relents because she doesn’t really feel like going to the store for WD-40, and, quote, “I like Richie well enough to keep him, anyway.”

None of this crosses Richie’s mind as he slips into the hallway, except for the vague thought that if his parents aren’t already up he’s probably woken them now, but that’s nothing new. Maggie and Wentworth are light sleepers after nearly fourteen years’ worth of Richie Tozier Shenanigans.

For a fleeting moment before Richie enters his bedroom he lets himself entertain the impossible notion that Eddie might be here. Maybe he snuck away from his mom and climbed through Richie’s window for a change. Richie will open the door and find Eddie lounging on his bed flipping through the latest _X-Men_ comic. He’ll look up and say, “Where the fuck have you been, dipshit?” and Richie will tackle him for making him worry like that. His chest aches with how badly he wants it to be real.

He pushes the door open. His room is empty. Of course it is. Richie’s an idiot.

There’s a satisfying _whumph_ as he flops onto his bed face first, the adrenaline of a day spent searching for and a night spent worrying about Eddie finally seeping away, lassitude weighing his muscles down. He feels heavy, like he could sink right down through his mattress and keep going. He thinks about closing his eyes, sleeping just for a little while, _you need to get at least eight hours a night or your growth will be stunted, Richie, _but he can’t. Something tugs at him still.

He turns his head to stare at his bedside table, a mess of comics and used cups and pimple cream (shut up). Gradually, he becomes aware of the blinking red light that breaks through a gap in the junk, and he bolts upright, shaking hands knocking aside a copy of _Wonder Woman _to reveal his phone with its steady, flashing light. Its steady, flashing, _voicemail_ light. Somebody called him last night.

Nobody other than the Losers’ Club has his phone number, and he knows none of the others called him last night. Heart in his throat, Richie lifts the phone to his ear, hits the message button and thinks _please, please, please,_ barely even knowing what he’s hoping for.

There’s silence when the message first starts, just a slight crackling down the line, and tears spring to his eyes at the knowledge that this probably isn’t even Eddie, probably just some dumbass cold caller that didn’t hang up in time, when he hears the soft, “Hey, Rich.”

He barely hears the next words over the flood of relief that hits him, a tidal wave that nearly knocks the breath from him, a steady stream of _he’s alive he’s alive he’s alive he’s ALIVE! _

Richie listens to the message all the way through three times. Then he puts the phone down and buries his face in his hands and cries. He cries like he hasn’t since he was really little in huge, heaving sobs that he can’t seem to stop, the ugly kind that have him gulping for air that never seems to be enough.

There’s a knock on his door that startles him badly enough that he stops crying. “Richie?”

It’s his mom. He sniffles, gross and wet, swiping at his face with the back of his hand as she pushes the door open – slowly, because she’s learned this lesson the hard way – to find him trembling on the edge of his bed. Her eyes widen as she takes him in. Her disgusting crybaby son who couldn’t even keep his best friend in the whole world safe. “What is it, honey?” she asks, coming to sit beside him. Her arm comes around his shoulder and for some reason it’s this that sets him off again, fresh tears spilling down his cheeks. He tries to stop, because what does _he _have to be crying about, he’s not the one whose mom tried to kill him, but he can’t.

His mom lets him cry himself out. She holds him through it, strokes a hand through his hair while he cries into her chest like he hasn’t in fuck-knows-how-long, soaking her shirt with snot and tears and drool as well, probably.

It feels like an age before he finally calms, drawing in great shuddering breaths that make his throat hitch and his head feel huge and swollen. He pulls away from his mom and she lets him, although she leaves a hand to run through the hair at the nape of his neck. It grounds him enough to look up and meet her gaze. She smiles at him. “There he is,” she says. “You ready to tell me what that was all about?”

Richie looks at her, really looks, takes in the crease of her brow and the softness of her gaze. He thinks of Ben saying _the adults just don’t care _and he opens his mouth to speak anyway, because somebody has to. Someone has to care. He just doesn’t know where to start.

“It’s- it’s Eddie,” he says at last. Maggie raises her eyebrows, but she doesn’t speak. He’s glad for it, because if she interrupts him now he doesn’t think he’ll be able to get the words out. “His mom’s been… hurting him.” He swallows. “Poisoning him. She’s making him _sick_, Mom, I swear!”

It all comes pouring out of him, then, the whole ugly story. It’s like drawing poison from a wound only he doesn’t feel any better for it. He’s just infecting somebody else with it. Still, he keeps talking, _it is a gift,_ tells her everything, about Eddie throwing his lunch away and Richie testing his food and the blood in the kitchen and talking the cops, and, “and now he’s gone, his mom took him to _Houlton,_ and we don’t know what’s happening and he had to leave me a voicemail because I wasn’t _here!_”

His mom stares at him. Her hand has gone still at the base of his neck and for a long, paralysing instant Richie thinks that she won’t believe him. Who the fuck would believe him? The cops didn’t listen to them, did they? He clenches his fists in the sheets underneath him and forces that away. She’s his _mom, _and she loves him and she’s going to believe him.

There’s a gentle press to his forehead that it takes him a moment to register as a kiss. When he looks at his mom, there are tears in her eyes, but her lips are one thin, furious line, the last line of defence between the world and an extremely vicious Maggie Tozier tongue-lashing. Richie is familiar with that much at least.

“Mom?” he ventures at last.

She startles. “Yes? Oh. Sorry, hon. I was just trying to remember how much gas is in the car.”

“How much-?” Richie gapes at her, stomach dropping to the floor. Ben was right, they don’t care about anything, no one ever- “What are you talking about, Mom? Are you even listening to me?”

“Of course I am, Richie,” she says, absently resuming her stroking of his hair. “I just don’t know how you expect us to get to Houlton if I don’t make sure there’s enough gas to make it. I don’t know where his aunt lives, you know. We’re gonna have to drive around the whole town until we find Sonia’s car.”

Richie’s heart leaps into his throat so hard that it leaves a bruise. “We’re going to get Eddie?”

“Well, we certainly can’t leave him there,” she says, “and if the cops aren’t doing anything about it then I don’t see another option.”

Richie throws himself at her, then, crushes his arms around her ribcage, forcing a tiny gasp of air from her as she pats at his back. “Thankyouthankyouthankyouthank-”

“We’d better get going,” his mom says. “I’ll get everything ready. You write a note for your father, you know he’ll wonder where we are if he gets back from the surgery to an empty house.”

“That’s his fault for working on a Saturday,” mutters Richie, his usual response flying from his mouth by rote more than anything else, but he does as she says, hands shaking almost too badly to write anything, and before he knows it they’re in the car and pulling out of the driveway.

A roadmap rests in Richie’s lap and he fidgets with the corners of it and jiggles his knee and chews on his lip and finally says, “What about the others? Can we bring Bill and Stan with us? Or Beverly? Or” –

“Richie,” says his mom as she turns out onto the main road, white-knuckling the steering wheel the whole way. “I don’t think I want to be adding kidnapping to everything else that’s going on right now. Your friends can see Eddie when he’s home safe.”

Richie can see his friends’ faces in his mind, panicked and furious and he knows he shouldn’t be doing this alone, or at least without telling them where he’s going, but. But it’s Eddie. There’s nowhere he wouldn’t go.

He sits back and watches the road rush by. He keeps breathing and reminds himself that Eddie is doing the same.

* * *

It’s not far to the bus station, in the end. Two miles, probably not even that, but it takes him twice as long as it normally would. After all, his legs are jelly and he spends the whole walk feeling like there’s enough air left in him for three steps further and no more. Three steps further each time, though, and eventually he reaches the bus station. It’s an ugly, blocky building with bays around the back for the buses. Several buses sit shadowy and empty, the glass windows reflecting the black night sky so that there’s no way to see inside. Eddie shies away from them.

If there's one thing this summer has taught him, it's to be wary of the things that live in the shadows. And the daylight, too, sometimes - the leper flashes through his mind before he can stop it, slimy and sunken and_ infectious_ \- but especially the shadows. He loops back around to the front of the building, because there's at least streetlights there. He sinks to the ground against the front wall of the building, below a bulletin board plastered with route maps and timetables. The cold seeps into him from the ground below him and the wall behind him and he thinks about moving again. He knows he needs to keep his pulse up because while he's not exactly freezing right now he's still got at least a couple of hours until this place opens up, and nowhere to shelter in the meantime.

He doesn't get up, though. He's anchored to the ground, sick and miserable and frustrated at himself for being so stupid about everything. Stupid not to stop and find a jacket before he left. Stupid not to have brought some water with him somehow. Stupid to have got himself into this situation in the first place, stupid to have confronted his mom, stupid to think he could be brave. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The rage is enough to keep him warm for a little while, but it doesn't last long and before he knows it Eddie is back to doing what he does best.

Worrying.

Where the fuck is he going? Okay, back to Derry, back to his friends, but then what? He rotates between their houses; tells their parents they're having a sleepover and hopes nobody notices his mom isn't around? She's going to work out he's missing soon anyway, and she's definitely going to chase after him and - there's just nowhere to _go_. His chest tightens and he clenches his fists in his hair, tugs at it, regretting it when a sharp knife of pain through his skull reminds him of the blow to his head.

She didn't hit him, though, right? She just knocked him down and he hit his head and it was an _accident. _She was just too rough with him_. Yeah_, he hears Richie's voice in his head, _too rough with you while she was trying to feed you poison, dude, what the fuck?_ He puts a hand to his throat and feels the breath that's wheezing in and out of him, almost comforting in its familiarity. Fucked up but still going. In and out.

It must be hours later by the time the sun creeps over the horizon. Slowly at first, the way it always is, the tiniest hint of grey pushing away the darkness and before he knows it the world is painted orange and gold and it feels like a weight has been shoved from his shoulders.

Daylight. Daylight means freedom, means he made it, means that even though his fingers are stiff and icy and his muscles are aching and he hasn't eaten in who knows how long he's going to be okay. It won't be long now until the buses start running, and then all he has to do is ride all the way back to Derry. That's it. Once he's there it'll be okay, somehow. He'll see his friends.

Now that he can see properly, he stands up, legs not as shaky as they were just hours ago. He goes to look at the maps, more for something to do than because he doesn't know the way. He has to change buses, he knows, and that pleases him somehow. It's like another obstacle to throw in his mom's path, another thing she'll have to see past before she figures out where he's gone.

"Hey, kid." Eddie startles at the gruff voice, whips around to face it and nearly trips over his own feet. He staggers and throws a hand against the wall for support.

The bus driver stares at him. Takes a drag of his cigarette. Raises his eyebrows. He’s average height, kind of portly, wearing a miserable grey polo and smoking a miserable grey cigarette and his face is covered in miserable grey stubble, but that’s it. Just a man.

Eddie flushes all the way to his toes, hating how easily scared he is. If he keeps acting like this nobody will ever trust him to so much as get on the bus by himself and he'll be sent home to mommy in a heartbeart.

"H-hey," says Eddie, throat dry. "Hi."

"You waiting for someone?"

"Uh. Something," says Eddie. "A bus. I need to get somewhere."

Another drag of the cigarette, smoke wafting close enough to Eddie that he feels his lungs tighten almost by instinct. "You got somewhere in mind?"

Eddie nods rapidly. "Yeah. Derry."

The man snorts, flicks the ash from the end of his cigarette. "That shithole? Better you than me. I'm heading that way, though, kid, you just stick with me." He gives Eddie a long look, grey eyes narrowed at him in a way that leaves Eddie feeling – not scared, not really, just… small. Young. “You been here long?”

“Uh,” says Eddie, again. “A couple of hours, I guess.”

“Must be cold,” says the man. He drops his cigarette to the ground and grinds it under his heel. “Come on. You can wait on the bus, least that way I can put the heating on for you.”

Eddie swallows. Now that the sun has risen he can see that the buses are all empty, just rows of vacant seats and not a leper or a clown in sight, but he’s still nervous. More than that, though, he’s cold, and sick of sitting on the hard ground, so he follows the driver around the side of the building to where one of the buses is parked.

The driver slides the doors open and gestures Eddie onto the bus. He wanders down the aisle, glances under the seats and tells himself he’s not looking for It. Then he turns on his heel and takes a seat at the very front of the bus, just behind the driver. The man glances over his shoulder, turning the key in the ignition. The heating groans into life.

“So,” he says. “You got someone waiting for you in Derry? Family?”

Eddie swallows. “Yeah. I do.”

The driver nods, and they sit in silence for another half an hour as the sun climbs higher in the sky and the feeling seeps back into Eddie’s extremities. Warmer, now, the exhaustion hits him, and he feels his eyes slipping shut. He’ll just rest them for a few minutes.

* * *

They run out of gas, eventually, halfway up the highway, so they park up at a rest stop where Richie stretches his restless legs and his mom fills up the tank. The rest stop isn’t massive, but it’s not small – a gas station and a McDonald’s and a bus stop where connecting buses come and go. The stink of gasoline and stale fries and exhaust fumes fills the air, but Richie doesn’t care. It’s the smell of the road and it means they’re that much closer to finding Eddie.

Richie leans against the passenger door and zones out, watching the flow of people and imagining that it’s him who’s got nowhere in particular to be. Drifting from town to town until he finds somewhere he fits.

Another bus pulls up to the stop in a cloud of exhaust fumes. The doors slide open. People slide out. Richie watches them, a sea of strangers spilling out into the world, and that’s when he sees him.

There’s a boy. Pale, kind of scrawny, dark hair and huge brown eyes. He looks up, looks around, gaze darting from one spot to another like a frightened animal. They lock eyes and the air is punched from Richie’s lungs in one brutal exhalation of, “Eddie.” He straightens up, certain it’s his eyes playing tricks – that it’s _It_ playing tricks – but Eddie is still there. He scrambles away from the car and bolts forwards, ignoring his mom’s startled cry.

“Eddie!”

Eddie is still, staring at him with such a blank, lost expression that for an awful moment Richie thinks he’s got it wrong, that this isn’t really Eddie, but then the ice breaks and he says, “_Richie_?” like he’s just seen Bigfoot or something.

There’s nothing else to do then but grab Eddie and pull him into the tightest hug Richie has given anyone, maybe ever. Eddie grips him back just as tightly, fingers digging into Richie’s back like he’s trying to tunnel right through his ribcage.

“What are you doing here?” says Eddie at last. He pulls out of the hug but neither of them can seem to let go, half-clutching at the other’s arms.

“Uh, looking for you?” Richie grins at him. “See, someone left me this real sad voicemail about being dragged all the way to Houlton…”

“I said I was coming home!” Even with the deep bags under his eyes and the – fuck, and the giant bruise on his forehead that Richie is just now noticing, half-obscured by his hair – Eddie is still a little shit.

“Well, whatever.” Richie slings an arm around Eddie’s shoulders. “I didn’t feel like waiting.”

“How did you even get here? Tell me you didn’t drive.”

“Hell no!” A gentle tug is enough to lead Eddie back towards the car, where his mom is waiting with an expression that Richie has never seen on her face before. “I told my mom what happened” he’s never telling anyone she walked in on him bawling his eyes out like a toddler, not even Eddie, “and she was all, ‘get in the car, we’re rescuing Eddie right now’ and I was like ‘Mom, do we have to?’ and she was like” –

“Shut up, Richie,” says Eddie. He’s slumped against Richie a little but he’s smiling and his eyes are suspiciously damp.

“Change of plans, Mom,” says Richie as they reach the car. “Look who I found.”

There’s a flurry of movement as his mom rushes over to make sure Eddie’s okay, cupping his face and running a hand over the back of his head and tutting over his bruise and asking him what happened, is he okay, do they need to see a doctor, never really letting Eddie get a word in edgeways until he’s finally able to assure her that he’s fine.

“Really, Mrs Tozier,” he says. “I’m okay. Thanks for coming after me,” he says, and he’s looking at his feet, cheeks pink, and Richie aches to know that he really thinks he needs to thank them for coming to save him from a woman who is pretty much trying to kill him. Is it so unexpected that somebody cares?

His mom looks between them. “All right,” she says at last. “We’ll get back to Derry, first, let you get some proper rest in a real bed.” She shakes her head. “What are the chances of us finding you here? Luck of the devil, you boys.” And she opens the car door.

Richie takes the backseat this time, him and Eddie both, because he’s still kind of worried that if he looks away for a second Eddie might disappear.

It’s not long before they’re on the road again, nothing but the rumbling of the car to break the silence. He catches Eddie slumping a few times before he jerks back awake, and when he gets sick of this, he tugs on Eddie’s shirt and pulls him down so that his head is in Richie’s lap. He instantly stiffens. “Richie, what…”

“Just sleep, Eds,” he says, cheeks hot. “You look like shit.” Eddie huffs out a breath but he finally relaxes enough that within a few minutes he’s sound asleep, chest rising and falling softly.

His mom meets his gaze in the rearview mirror and Richie starts to sweat. He breaks the moment to look out of the window. The world rushes past and he lets it go, Eddie with him safe at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See? I can be nice :)


End file.
